Goodsprings Scorpion Scramble
by Grits 'n' Gravy
Summary: Titus and Olivia go to Goodsprings to hang out, but a problem arises. They solve it their way. m!LW/Rose of Sharon Cassidy, m!LW/f!C, implied Sunny/Ringo. Full title "Goodsprings Scorpion Scramble; or, Fun with Weapons." Genre: also Romance, Humor. Written for the Fallout kink meme.
1. IV

**TW:** Language throughout. This chapter: Explosive violence.

**A/N: **I'm sorry, everybody, I screwed up with this. I'm going to try switching around the chapters to put it in linear order here. For action, start here (IV); for sex, VII. I posted it deliberately out-of-order.

I hope you'll read and tell me what you think. I'm trying to get better at writing.

I wrote this for the _Fallout_ Kink Meme. Prompt: "If I did it my way any/any: Basically is there anything that just screams for you to hit (D. None of the above) in a quest or maybe something that makes no logical sense to you. Make it as crack like or angst ridden or smut filled as you want go wild."

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"**Goodsprings Scorpion Scramble; or, Fun with Weapons**"

December 2281

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**IV**

_Facility — Grove — Chariot — Dry Lake — Pandinus Imperator — Movement — Messin' with Radscorpions — Herd — Predation — Relay — No Hard Liquor — Progress — Long Run — Variable Power — Gunfight — VATS — Shock — Scorpion Scramble — Returner — Penetration — Victoria_

To keep the place locked down tight and concealed the primary helipad of Titus's underground military lab facility thing was normally lidded over by a dome of camouflaged covering, but as he'd asked it was open when he got there in the Black Hawk. He landed cautiously, but it was routine.

He ran into a section he called the grove, a huge interior garden park thing that natural light got into through the ceiling, where he kept his dog pack, to see and play and run with them for a few minutes. They were all doing well. They'd been fed. He didn't encounter either of the two white-beige cats who stayed with him, who usually avoided dogs. The grove was a big place, and a bunch of other animals were in there too, such as birds; No problems with them.

Then he went to the air control area, saying hi to almost half of his employees on the way. Viana was in the pilot's lounge, ready and excited to go, already wearing a flight suit and carrying her helmet.

They got right to it.

Viana was easy to talk to. So was Titus. They chatted on the way southwest.

As they flew, over the intercom Titus said, "Hey Viana. You're Japanese, right?"

"Asian, I guess," Viana said. "I don't know which one."

Titus said, "Korean?"

"I really don't know," Viana said. It took her several seconds to realize Titus had been joking, and even then it was because he was laughing. Viana laughed too and said, "Dammit, Titus."

Olivia listened as Titus took to the air again and updated her and the Boomers on his progress over radio. She liked knowing what was going on in the world around her; it was mundane, though.

The most—the worst—radscorpions Titus had ever encountered had been at this one dry lakebed thing near the NCR's Mojave Outpost, which was in California. He'd been to the lakebed twice or maybe just the once. Not Ivanpah Lake; this one was further south. It was a big empty place with a military cargo plane crashed in. He hadn't thought to give it a place marker on his PIP-Boy map, the pre-war world map or the local sonar one; he just avoided it. The closest place he'd marked seemed to be the Morning Star cavern, which he wouldn't be going near. Nightstalkers were fast.

Nightstalkers wouldn't have trouble slaughtering a few Powder Gangers, but neither would Olivia alone. Killing Powder Gangers was easy; they'd all apparently learned combat from watching hamsters play-fighting. Ease of slaughtering Powder Gangers wasn't Titus's only search criterion. He needed—well, wanted—critters that were kind of easy to kill, too. With Olivia's Hécate 2 or his SRS even giant radscorpions went down easy, sometimes exploding bodily on the way. Radscorpions were quick in a rage but not good distance runners, and foolhardy; they never backed down from a fight. It was difficult to scare them away from anything. They wouldn't be able to escape Goodsprings once Titus got them there. They also wouldn't try to.

On the way to the dry lake, Titus thought about what route to take back to Goodsprings. He'd thought about it before, but now that he was about to get there it was suddenly worth reviewing. He couldn't go through Primm's streets or bystanders would get killed, but if he went around the town, west, he'd get feral ghouls chasing him too, and he wasn't sure there was a way through to the east; it might've been blocked off by fences or something.

He didn't want to waste time thinning his herd once he'd gathered them, either; might not have time to. He was concerned that gathering the herd would be by far the hardest part. Or the most dangerous, anyway. If he gathered too many he'd have to kill some, and he didn't want to kill any more animals than he had to—they were ornery and gigantic, but still innocent animals—to take out the half dozen or whatever poorly armed convicts-cum-raiders.

Before they got to the dry lake, Titus and Viana passed by a map marker Titus had labeled "Nipton Road Pit Stop." He wasn't sure why he bothered capitalize each word. There were almost always Jackal raiders there, at the pit stop, but he didn't think about that until he heard dings and pangs on the helicopter's fuselage; Jackals down there were shooting at him, the bastards. He couldn't hear the gunshots. The small-arms fire just bounced off the helicopter, though; Titus didn't worry about it, Viana hardly noticed, and the Jackals quickly lost interest. He still considered sending some missiles their way; The helicopter was very much armed.

Titus and Viana circled the lakebed area for 30 minutes.

While communicating with Olivia and the Boomers about his and their statuses, Titus mapped the ground area out in his head as best he could. He could see where most of the radscorpions below were, though they were all moving and likely would be elsewhere by the time he got out. He still paid attention. He thought he saw some yellow or gold giant geckos too.

In a holding pattern, he and Viana waited for Joe Cobb to start moving. Cobb was at the place Titus had marked "Powder Ganger Camp West," just southwest of the Jean airport on I-15. It was a little closer to Goodsprings than Titus would've liked, and for the distance he'd have to run.

Before telling Titus that Cobb had started moving, the Boomers double-checked it and re-verified that it was really Cobb, so a few seconds had gone by.

Titus specifically addressed Olivia to make sure she'd heard.

Olivia said, "He's what? Over."

"Were you listening, Pretty Lady? Over," Titus said.

"Not really, it was pretty boring. Uh, over," Olivia said.

Titus laughed. He said, "Cobb just started moving. I'm gonna get going. I'll let all you guys know when I get out, but I might not be able to talk as much for a couple minutes. Just so you know."

Titus and Viana swung around and brought the UH-60M to a low then lower hover, and Titus told everyone over the radio he was getting out, until they were only a few feet above the ground. By then Titus was putting his flight helmet down, plugging his LASH II headset into his radio manpack and putting its backpack on, strapping on his Enhanced Combat Helmet and HK417A2 battle rifle, and touching Viana on the arm as kind of a thanks and a gesture of solidarity and for good luck though he didn't believe in luck. Viana was going to stay with him at first but then head to Goodsprings and land north of town, out of the Powder Gangers' path.

Titus hopped out of the helicopter onto cracked dry sand and immediately remembered to pull down his dust goggles in the rotor wash cyclone; He was in a storm of sand, and it was hard to see even with them on.

He had 126-grain M993 high velocity armor-piercing rounds loaded in a couple of the transparent 20-round magazines for his HK417, including the current one, incase anything went wrong and he had to shoot his way through gigantic radscorpions. Olivia had loaded the bullets for him, based on pre-war US military specs, and he'd supplied the materials.

He pulled the battle rifle's charging handle and chambered a round and the ejection port's dust cover popped open, then he flicked the fire selector from safe to semi-automatic and looked around. He thought he might have to shoot something mutated and giant. He did his best to stay aware, so if any radscorpions had already got that close, maybe attracted to the noise of the strange dark flying machine, he might at least see them before they could strike. He flicked the fire selector once more to full-automatic. He and Viana had done their best to spot any radscorpions near his deployment zone and hadn't seen any, but he couldn't be sure, and now he was exposed.

He started moving as soon as his goggles were on. He was maybe 30 yards north of the crashed cargo plane. He remembered getting past that before encountering radscorpions, and all the ones he and Viana had spotted from the air had been south of its wreckage.

Viana pulled the Black Hawk up and away. As she did he heard the engines whine, and got his bearings. He saw there weren't any radscorpions near him, and that he hadn't missed being chomped on. He didn't see anything near him.

He raised his right arm to use the Personal Information Processor (PIP)-Boy 3000A computer on his forearm—a joint venture between RobCo Industries and Vault-Tec Industries featuring Vault-Tec's goofy mascot Vault Boy. He turned on its Identify Friend-or-Foe (IFF) short-range radar, and saw a few red vertical bar slashes on its dial around him. The IFF displayed on the PIP-Boy's compass. He couldn't tell what the red slashes were; one of the 3000A's drawbacks. Titus had optimized and tweaked his PIP-Boy's settings and made a few after-market modifications, so now it wasn't always on, wasting power and distracting him; He'd also installed an old military motion tracker, but didn't want to bother using that.

Three red slashes were in the direction where he expected to find a horde of radscorpions.

So he wouldn't slip and shoot himself in the dick or something, he flicked the HK417's fire selector back to safe, closed the dust cover for the weapon's sake as sand was blowing around everywhere, though the weapon would fire even if he submerged it in sand, and ran toward his vague destination.

Passing by the cargo plane wreckage, he slung the HK417 on his back and drew his sidearm, a slightly blocky-looking but sleek black semi-automatic Glock 22C pistol, and racked its slide, chambering the first of 15 rounds in its magazine—he tried to remember the number—and cocking it, and kept it up in his hands.

He intended not to go far into radscorpion territory, so he wouldn't get more of them following him than he wanted.

He saw two radscorpions, then kept moving and raised his PIP-Boy to check its IFF dial on the compass again. It showed five red red slashes, likely radscorpions. He moved further. Then a little further.

One small radscorpion started heading toward him, suspicious, from off to his right, 50 or 60 yards away. He wouldn't need to work to get its attention. It was small as radscorpion sizes went, but still giant compared to any natural pre-FEV Emperor scorpion, their average full size having been about that of an adult person's hand; this one was bigger than a basketball, several feet long, and its stinger-tipped tail rose more than a foot into the windy sandy air above it, maybe more than two feet.

He moved further south, not at a full run anymore.

Titus remembered Cobb was advancing on Goodsprings. He wanted people to see what the radscorpions made of the Powder Gangers, but then he thought about that more; If he could just kill all the Gangers before they reached Goodsprings, the people of Goodsprings needn't be anywhere near gunfire; no stray bullets hurting people or bighorners or wasteland penguins or brahmin, or damaging property. Cobb was moving at a crawl, but still in Goodsprings' direction. Titus picked up his pace.

He saw a lot of red on his PIP-Boy in a few more seconds, and the small radscorpion had started to run at him, rather than pointedly stroll.

He got an urge to shoot it through its stupid little head. For just a second he considered doing it: Holster the 22C, whip around the HK417, unsafe it as he put its stock in the meat of his shoulder and lined up its sights, put the front sight over the radscorpion, pull the trigger once, and it would almost certainly be dead. But he didn't do it.

He also didn't use his PIP-Boy's Vault-Assisted Targeting System (VATS), but wondered how many radscorpions he might be able to spot if he did. He expected he'd count quite a few more than he wanted. There must have been some kind of nest.

He watched the radscorpions he could see—there was a stiff breeze in the dry lakebed, and a lot of flying sand—to work out their relative sizes and distances from him. Some seemed big and far away but were small and close. A few seemed like they couldn't possibly be as large as they were.

Titus picked out two of the biggest and fired his 22C pistol at each of them once. The biggest ones were easily eight feet long and several tall, not including their tails.

He was using a .40 S&amp;W load of Olivia's, who went for velocity and accuracy; this one very accurate, with a muzzle velocity of about 965 feet per second; and despite the wind he heard pops as the gun went off pretty clearly through earplugs. The load wasn't supersonic—the speed of sound about 1,100 fps. He wouldn't be able to find or collect the bullet casings. The bullets were 180-grain Hornady XTP hollowpoints, XTP a brand/marketing name, "eXtreme Terminal Performance." He didn't know if their terminal performance was extreme, but their ballistics and accuracy were good.

He wasn't sure what kind of feeling sensitivity radscorpions had, though he knew they had raised sensory hairs on their pincers and tails, which made them even uglier, and he was pretty sure they would feel the bullets' impacts against their exoskeletons. He didn't think it would cause any pain. They'd probably hear the pistol going off somehow, too.

He also fired at two smaller, about average-sized radscorpions—still gigantic ones, as big as a very large dog or two, but of an average size among the other sizes of radscorpions—with a plan to shoot a few more, but a great deal of them seemed to have become interested in him by then.

Both of the average-sized radscorpions staggered when the bullets hit. Hollowpoints mushroom, expanding on impact, expending their energy immediately; but, hitting a surface as hard as the radscorpions' shells, Titus wondered if the bullets might not just explode into a useless confetti of fast-moving sharp metal fragments, insubstantial, without enough direct energy behind them to pierce tough exoskeleton, then maybe the main bodies of the bullets would bounce off them harmlessly as well. Evidently when the bullets hit they still had some force. He didn't see any yellow-green gore fly into the air.

His smaller targets felt the bullet hits. They reacted. He surveyed them before moving.

He was gathering a crowd now. He imagined one of the radscorpions saying, when it felt the bullet hit, "That's a right statement of intent, that is!"

The one that'd noticed him first was closer than the others, but still distant. It'd got lucky spotting him. He moved and tried to make it draw even with his other pursuers.

There were more in the crowd following him, he saw, than he thought he'd need; three of the giant ones (two probably would've done), five of the normal ones, and between four and eight small ones.

Titus started running again, but not at full speed, and not at a sprint. He didn't want to lose them.

One of the giant radscorpions sprinted ahead of the others. They did that sometimes. Titus decided to just let it be closer. If he put more distance between him and them he might lose the others somehow.

Titus put the 22C back in its holster on his leg and kept running. Not at full speed.

He went east wide, then whipped back west, running past the Nipton Road Pit Stop so fast that the six or so raiders there didn't even have time to start shooting at him until a second before the radscorpions started mangling and killing all of them. Two of the Jackals went down before any of them fought back.

Titus got a little too far away to appreciate it, so he went back closer.

It took a few seconds longer than he thought it would for the radscorpions to kill the rest of the Jackals. One of them started screaming pretty badly as two then three of the radscorpions pulled her apart, fighting over her. And one wore jury-rigged scrap metal armor crudely shaped and badly welded, which the first two radscorpions' tail stingers couldn't pierce, so they held the human still with their pincers and pulled and twisted and collaborated to remove the man's legs and arms messily. When he was down at their height they just started eating him.

Only one of the radscorpions went through all of the Jackals to get to Titus. He didn't see it get shot at. It was average-sized. He respected its tenacity.

Titus ran around in a loop, going away from the pit stop and then circling back close to it. On the way he ran right past some of the radscorpions, and shot at three others with his pistol. They mostly looked busy and content, eating the corpses or howling not-quite corpses of the Jackals. Some of them just milled around doing nothing. Titus might've lost a few of his pursuers to their prey here. Most of them readily started chasing after him again, though. He didn't pause to count them. He didn't mind; he'd had too many, and those he lost he'd fed Jackals. That was okay. The three giant ones were all still interested. That was good; The Powder Gangers might have a chance against smaller radscorpions.

He zig-zagged, and took the lull in the chase to update the Boomers, Olivia and Viana, who was still flying in the Black Hawk, on his status over radio. Olivia said he was crazy again. The Boomers still seemed to think what he was doing would be more fun to watch than Cobb and company's slow progress toward Goodsprings; Titus agreed, but politely asked the Boomers to focus just on the Powder Gangers. He had them stop tracking other Powder Gangers, but be wary incase any more joined Cobb's group, or something, and with two drones the Boomers could easily comply. Cobb was walking with five other men. Titus suspected that one or both of the UCAV crews glanced down at himself, running and more interestingly pursued by a small horde of radscorpions, anyway.

_I gotta speed up_, Titus thought as the Boomers updated him on Cobb's progress. Cobb was passing by the Jean airport.

Titus shot at a few of the bigger radscorpions. That seemed to do the trick; the whole group sped up. Titus almost needed to exert himself to stay ahead of them, yet tantalizingly close enough to keep them interested, and still vary his speed and navigate rough terrain. He was getting a good run in.

Back in Goodsprings atop the Prospector Saloon, in her peripheral vision Olivia saw Cass pulling something alcoholic out of her bag. Cass went to take a drink. Olivia stopped her. Cass snorted irritably.

"What's my rule?" Olivia asked her.

"Dammit, Courier," Cass said.

"What's my rule?"

Cass said, "No hard liquor before 11 am." She looked to Olivia, then looked longingly at her big bottle of whiskey, then put it back in her bag. "What time is it, anyway?"

Olivia moved her forearm so Cass couldn't see her PIP-Boy's display, then checked the time. It was well after noon. Olivia didn't share that.

Titus ran well, making progress, feeling good, going past a Nevada Highway Patrol station where the radscorpions killed three more Jackals and one loose Powder Ganger wearing typical wasteland merc armor stuff, asking for updates, letting Olivia and everybody know how he was doing. Cobb was still between Jean and Goodsprings; There were miles between them.

Titus passed by Primm, using an underpass he hadn't remembered until he'd seen it just now so he wouldn't give the radscorpions any targets or hopefully distractions. The underpass was cluttered with junk. He hoped his radscorpions were in enough of a line to get through and not get caught on anything. They all seemed to make it just fine. He heard somebody yell "Save me Jeebus!" as radscorpions passed underneath them. Cobb was nearing Goodsprings' water source, a few minutes' walk south of town. That was too close.

Titus thought about breathing and updated everybody on his progress, but first checked where he was: Running, he looked at his PIP-Boy's world map, zoomed in far enough that not even all of Clark County was in picture. The PIP-Boy and the global positioning system (GPS) it used were tracking him well—ever since he'd commandeered a bunch of satellites and made some system tweaks, the GPS had been working a lot better, and sometimes even got right which way the PIP-Boy was facing. He told the Boomers and Olivia where he was. He was tremendously glad he ran so much, miles and miles every day; He was doing just fine even after such a run.

Olivia heard Titus saying over radio, not sounding very exerted, "I'm passing through Primm quite quickly right now. Over."

Titus passed by the Powder Ganger camp that Cobb had come from, then the Jean airport seconds later. His trail of radscorpions was holding up. A few of them seemed to have wandered off, but there were still three giant ones chasing him, swinging their stingers, clamping their pincers, making creepy chittering noises.

Titus was following the road, making good time, when Olivia first told him that she could see Cobb through the variable power scope she had on her Hécate 2, a big Bushnell Elite Tactical Long Range Scope (LRS) 5–15x40mm zoomed in to about 10-power with a mil-dot reticle—a series of dots on normal crosshairs developed in the 1970s to help US Marine snipers estimate distances—and about two minutes later that Sunny and the Powder Gangers had started shooting.

Damn, he hadn't timed it perfectly. He was just passing by Goodsprings' water source. He looked back at his trail of monsters. Two or three giant purple geckos had joined it. They weren't attacking or being attacked by the radscorpions. And—was that really . . . ?—for just a second, Titus thought he saw a person in typical slipshod raider armor running alongside the radscorpions. A giant, very pale brown Arizona bark scorpion had also joined the group somewhere, but as Titus saw it, it and one of the average-sized radscorpions both stopped chasing him and started fighting each other. The radscorpion was a little bigger. He didn't have time to find out who won.

Looking at him through a pair of meager 2.43-fixed-power M&amp;A binoculars, Sunny got a good view of Titus, running, with a bunch of very large dark blurry forms chasing him. There was enough light to see him quite clearly, him and the lines of his legs and his arms and his shoulders and the gear he was wearing. And his face.

"_That's_ Titus? Oh my god . . . _Oh my god_ . . . " Sunny said.

"What, you didn't get a good look before?" Olivia said. "You were totally checking him out!"

"I was . . . I just forgot how hot he is," Sunny said.

Olivia said, "He is a sexy son of a bitch."

"Damn he's fast," Sunny said.

Titus heard the distant cracking and popping of gunfire in Goodsprings, saw some flashes of light.

The way it had gone was:

For a few seconds, as the Powder Gangers, inside of Goodsprings, walked closer and closer to her, Olivia kept thinking that suddenly, unannounced, Titus and his cloud of radscorpions would just appear and it'd all be over, quickly and cleanly.

Then Sunny stood straight up and started firing her varmint rifle, most of their plan thrown out with her bullet, and by her second shot the Powder Gangers, who didn't all have guns, mostly all started firing back, and all the Goodspringers with guns started to shoot back at them too, and the Gangers were too far away to start throwing dynamite, then Sunny's gun jammed—it looked like the bolt got stuck along in the breech, after extraction of the fired casing—and Sunny crouched back behind the wall of the Prospector Saloon's façade.

Olivia panicked a little, not sure what to do. Later she was incredibly embarrassed by this but only told Titus, who didn't judge her for it or laugh. She'd thought he would be there by then, despite him and others cautioning her otherwise.

She looked around. Trudy with her new shotgun that Titus gave her a week ago, Raúl with his big very loud revolver, Cass with her crappy over-and-under double-barreled 20-gauge shotgun and ED-E with his laser were all firing, making lots of noise and occasionally barking things at the Powder Gangers. After a few seconds Sunny stood back up and started shooting again too.

Olivia set her Hécate 2 down barrel-up and checked that her radio, at her feet, was on and on the right channel, then—then remembered she'd just seen Titus and focused on breathing for a second or two.

Cautiously she took up her Hécate 2 and rose. Bullets went off and flew by all around her, bouncing off and embedding in the saloon's façade with great thunks, and snapping and zipping as they flew by her into the air. She set the heavy Hécate 2 down on its bipod against the roof, then shouldered it, flicked the safety off and surveyed the Powder Gangers.

There were six of them.

She looked between Powder Gangers for a ranged threat and found one in about the middle of the pack to the right holding a rifle, probably a varmint rifle. They were all just standing there and shooting and moving side-to-side a little.

She moved her arms around each other with some difficulty and pressed a button on the top side of her PIP-Boy, engaging her VATS, injecting herself intravenously with a large dose of adrenaline that made her vision much sharper and clearer and seemed to slow down time.

She hoped she'd zeroed her Hécate 2's scope for a very short range, which she probably had, and aimed just above the man's left knee exposed in black shorts and pulled the rifle's light, 3-pound trigger. During travel she jerked it a little, which threw her aim off, but at this range not critically; It still hit. She didn't practice shooting enough.

Olivia's Hécate 2 had on the end of its barrel by default a huge reverse-flow muzzle brake which reduced the considerable felt recoil of .50 BMG officially by 50%, to more like what she'd expect of a 7.62x51mm/.308 rifle. She certainly still felt it fire, but it didn't make her lurch two fucking feet backward, either. The weapon still jumped. Her sight picture went back, upward. It felt good.

The muzzle blast was considerable, though it didn't look like much in daylight; it was extravagantly violent at night, with big gouts of flame blasting forward and left and right out of the cuts in the muzzle brake. It was also loud as hell, at any time, and made louder by the muzzle brake. From the massive percussion and pressure of the round going off, smoke and dust—she wasn't even sure where it came from—flew up into the air all around and in front of the Hécate 2's barrel, and acrid burnt gunpowder smell rushed back past Olivia in the wind.

For a few inches above and below the knee, the man's leg simply disappeared, in a dark blurry explosion of gore and chunks of bone and red muscle and stringy skin tearing. All Olivia could see was some lower thigh, and the man's foot sideways on the ground, gone above the shin somewhere, a small pool of blood already gathering below him, quickly being added to at a pour from both the man's thigh and dismembered lower leg, apparently from several different blood vessels in each.

The bullet must've buried itself in the dirt and sand of the desert somewhere far behind him. It'd crashed through the soft tissue and bone of the leg like it was nothing.

She should've put the center of her crosshairs lower. She might've put the bullet high enough for shock from the tens of thousands of foot/pounds of energy of the big .50 cal round to hit the femoral artery, a major one; the Powder Ganger might pass out or bleed to death before Titus and the radscorpions got there.

For the time being, she'd have to be content with the man's pitiful high screaming of bloody murder, and agonized rolling around on the street's patchy paved blacktop, as he tried to hold his blood in what was left of his leg with both hands, only to see it spurt thickly through his fingers.

"Gotcha, bitch!" she said out loud. Likely no one heard her. She didn't hear herself.

Satisfied, Olivia reached forward and unlocked the Hécate 2's bolt, rotated it up and pulled back and with a belch of white smoke a huge brass .50 Browning Machine Gun casing sprang out and flew and spun a couple of feet to the right, and the next round in the magazine popped up, pushed by springs. She pushed the bolt back forward, stripping the next round from the mag and into the chamber, and locked the bolt back down.

She could see Titus. The ground behind him seemed to be following him. Then Olivia realized it was living things, chasing him; The plan had actually worked.

Olivia had made sure nobody stood on her right, but there Sunny was now, down off her stand. Olivia looked in time to see Sunny's booted feet shuffling as Olivia's ejected .50 BMG casing hit the floor/roof. It must've hit Sunny in the torso somewhere and fallen down, bounding around the skinny young woman's curves and her leather armor and its straps. "Dammit, Sunny," Olivia said, but Sunny—who like some other people in town had declined to wear any sort of earplugs or hearing protection—likely deaf, didn't seem to hear.

It felt like only a second later: Titus was passing by six very confused Powder Gangers, two or three of them wounded and bleeding, and one on the ground with a leg looking unnaturally short. Titus heard another of them see all the radscorpions behind him and yell "OH MY FUCK!"

Titus wanted to go up to Olivia and Trudy and Sunny and the rest and retrieve his SRS, but he wanted to watch this happening even more. He didn't think it would take long. He paused just before the Prospector Saloon.

Then . . .

It was glorious.

Olivia tried to watch each individual death, but the radscorpions—and was that one of those big geckos?—made such quick work of the six Powder Gangers that she could only snatch glimpses of it all. An arm, firing a pistol, suddenly bending around itself impossibly; she realized it'd been lopped off and was just spinning as it fell. At some point the people of Goodsprings started cheering all around her. Olivia heard Titus re-tasking the Boomers over the radio to track the radscorpions rather than the Powder Gangers. Cass taking a swig of something. A whole human leg flying through the air, trailing blood. Several screams at once; Agony. An arm holding a lit stick of dynamite going into a gecko's open mouth, and both the gecko and the man the arm belonged to exploding and throwing everything nearby into the air, including an awful lot of dust and sand and smoke, except for one giant radscorpion the size of a small pre-war car. Screaming. Joe Cobb's face blank and pale, through her scope's ocular lens close up, its mouth wide open, blood pouring out.

Titus made it up onto the roof in time for at least a few radscorpions to still be alive; all of the giant ones. He'd get to help clean up the mess.

He accepted and returned hugs from Viana, from Cass—with a big kiss on the cheek and a private smile—from surprisingly Raúl, from Rex, from Sunny, and from Cheyenne who tried to jump on him then just licked his hand, from Trudy, and finally from Olivia. That one felt the best by far. She kissed him on the cheek twice, once for each side. He kissed both her cheeks back smiling, nearly going for her lovely full lips and mouth. Then they hugged again.

Sunny interrupted. She said, much too loudly because of new hearing damage, "Our guns' bullets are just making those rad-scorpions mad. We need you guys to finish them off."

Titus and Olivia watched for a few seconds. They saw one Goodspringer with a single-barreled shotgun repeatedly shoot one giant stationary radscorpion, which didn't even seem to notice it was being shot. They saw Ringo, from the top of the general store, firing off the side, empty a pistol magazine on two average-sized radscorpions, and two or three times saw a bullet strike dull grey-black exoskeleton and ricochet off. One bullet thunked into the wall of the general store. One kicked up dirt out behind the store on a small hill.

Sunny had killed one of the geckos in Titus's train with her varmint rifle, but had next tried shooting a gigantic radscorpion and the same rifle hadn't worked against it. She'd seen the bullet just bounce off.

"CAN I BORROW A GUN?" Sunny asked Olivia. Sunny couldn't tell she was speaking at full volume. Olivia nodded and shifted her Hécate 2 to her left hand, which was a challenge, then drew her Beretta M9A3 with her right hand, and gave it to Sunny. "Try this," Olivia said. It only occurred to her seconds later that Sunny probably couldn't hear her words. Maybe Sunny could read lips. "I don't have a round chambered so you'll need to rack the slide. That has one of the newer 17-round magazines in it."

Sunny got most of what Olivia said.

Thinking _How could you get that many bullets into anything?_, Sunny pulled the M9A3's slide back—it moved easily, certainly easier than her varmint rifle's bolt—and let its spring clink it back forward, not loud among all the gunfire popping and cracking around them, loading a round and cocking the pistol's exposed hammer. "Your varmint rifle's five-five-six, right?" Olivia asked.

"Yeah," Sunny said.

"That round _should_ be faster than my nine-mil here," Olivia said, "but maybe you were using hollowpoints or soft points or wadcutters or something. I have FMJ loaded in that mag. They might penetrate better. Or not."

Nervous from the firefight, Sunny wasn't even sure why she asked, "What's FMJ?"

Sometimes Olivia forgot that not everybody loaded their own ammo and knew lots about different types of bullets and stuff.

"Full metal jacket," Olivia said. "It's just the default."

Sunny tried Olivia's kind of weird-looking futuristic open-top pistol. Sunny brought it up into both hands and tried the safety on the slide with her thumb. It dropped the hammer; She'd de-cocked the pistol. Damn. She pulled the hammer back down with her thumb. There was a lull in the gunfire around her long enough for her to hear the hammer click, dimly through ringing ears. One of the Powder Gangers was still screaming. Sunny brought the pistol back up. Olivia had installed radioactive tritium night sights on it, which in the late afternoon didn't glow but showed up pretty well as three greenish white dots. Sunny lined them up over a slowly-moving average-sized radscorpion, focused on the front sight, covering where on the radscorpion's face she wanted to hit, and fired. It seemed like she had to put a lot of weight on the trigger for the first shot. She almost didn't think it would go off. Then the trigger finally broke and the gun popped loudly as a round went off and the gun jumped back and up. The slide shot back faster than she could see and threw the little empty bullet casing way out back and to the right, cycling forward and cocking again automatically and loading the next round. She wasn't used to pistols, though the 9x19mm Parabellum recoil wasn't hard to deal with. Her rifle kicked more. She had to bring the pistol back down and re-aim. She fired two more times, faster. Then the radscorpion was dead. Somebody else might've shot it too.

Looking around the back and sides of the Prospector Saloon along with Olivia, Titus chambered a round in his SRS, shouldered it and unsafed it as Olivia took out one radscorpion, worked her bolt, which took a while because it was huge, and then took out two more, both in one shot. The first of those two, a giant one, shot backward a few feet and slumped over slowly from the force of the bullet. When the bullet went through the big one and hit the second one, an average one, its body exploded, into a mess of gore and giblets and pieces of abdomen and legs. Titus heard her ejected brass bouncing around on the rooftop—ringing hollow metal. Titus had thought Olivia was using FMJ rounds, or maybe match; he mentally noted to ask if she was using Nammo Raufoss Mark 211s again—combined effects High-Explosive Incendiary/Armor Piercing (HEIAP) rounds meant for use mostly on light armored vehicles and machinery.

Unlike nearly every weapon he encountered in the area, Titus's SRS was designed and built to work in bad conditions—the kind of beating that hard use in the windy, hot, dry, sandy Mojave Desert brought upon a weapon. It was also easy to shoot and work with. It would be a joy to take out some radscorpions with Olivia and friends.

Titus found a giant radscorpion still alive and reflex-shot it, using the profile of his weapon more than its expensive Leupold &amp; Stevens scope, which he'd zeroed at 200 meters (218 yards) anyway. He was lucky, but also good at doing that. The shot was flawless. And loud, though not nearly as loud as Olivia's rifle. And he'd fired without deploying his rifle's Harris bipod, so he felt all the recoil, which was unfriendly at best. The armor-piercing .338 Lapua Magnum round he fired went straight through the radscorpion, whose creepy multi-eyed face seemed to explode yellow from pure force, and then it got stuck in the pincer of a smaller radscorpion directly behind it, but the bullet still hit hard enough to spin that radscorpion around and confuse it, and then the dropping corpse of the giant radscorpion landed right on top of the smaller one, pinning it down and, from the dull dry crunch sound, breaking one or two of its legs.

Titus cycled his SRS's bolt, kicking out one long smoking shell. He fired again; he tried shooting around the giant radscorpion's body to hit the smaller one, and it seemed to work. Even if he hadn't properly aimed around the big one's body, he'd fired a 253-grain armor-piercing round traveling at about 2,970 feet per second; At such close range it'd probably go through the giant radscorpion.

He cycled the bolt again, watching where his shell landed to remember to retrieve it. .338 Lapua Magnum was extremely rare.

He'd seen two or three average-sized radscorpions running behind the saloon, between it and the general store.

Titus saw Viana firing her pistol at an average-sized radscorpion back that way. One or two other people were shooting at it too. After three or four of Viana's shots and by the time Titus aimed, the radscorpion had stopped moving. Viana had bought herself the same service pistol she'd used when she was still in the military, the NCR's standard issue sidearm, a 9x19mm Browning Hi-Power, the same pistol Ringo and at least one Goodsprings settler had. It was very common in the Mojave.

Titus briskly checked in with his Boomer UCAV teams over the radio. They were tracking three more radscorpions, but with two Reapers in the area they were also scanning for any more they might've missed.

"Three more," Titus called out incase anyone would hear, swinging around his HK417 and holding the SRS in one hand; It was so small that was easy. He unclipped the battle rifle from its sling and handed it to Viana, whom he'd trained and drilled and shot with before; she knew how to use it, though she was nowhere near as good with guns as Olivia, or as crazy about them, which was probably healthy. Her pistol wasn't effective against radscorpions, but his HK417 was. He told her it already had a round in the chamber. She had hearing protection in; she understood. Viana started looking for targets with the battle rifle, but Titus never heard her fire. He heard Olivia fire—the deep, very loud boom of .50 BMG going off—a few times.

By the time Titus found his next hostile target, Olivia was already killing it. Her bullet went through a pincer, which exploded, and its arm started flailing, spraying bright blood, as the bullet went through its head area and scrambled some important parts inside, bouncing around in its carapace, causing its corpse to jump a few feet backward and rotate then twitch for a while.

Titus went around and shook hands with and congratulated everybody. He hugged Olivia, who seemed a little high despite only firing eight times. Then again, eight times with .50 BMG was like a good deal more than that with normal bullets, even if her rifle did have that really good muzzle brake.

* * *

**Original characters (by me):** Viana (ex-NCR vertibird pilot), Arturo (Goodsprings settler)

**A/N:** As I said I wrote this for the kink meme. I mention the prompt I'm posting it to (on part VI, page 18), but I didn't write Goodsprings Scorpion Scramble for any one specific prompt; that's a simplification. I wrote this on speculation, kind of just with stuff I thought of. I was almost done writing before I even started checking for prompts. It corresponds with several. I picked "do it your way" because I sort of liked that one best, and it was unfilled. I considered a few more, like one, with I think four fills, asking for basically a day in the life.

I have a really long A/N on the kink meme version. Longer than this. I'm sorry for that too.

I said this on the meme too: I deal with and comment on videogame logic, artificial stupidity, space compression, glitches and general gameplay limitations/shortcomings in this, so a few things might not quite make sense—that's deliberate. I'm not dissing the _Fallout_ games or anything, I just had to address it somehow as I wrote this.

Because this is _Fallout_ there's gun stuff. Pop culture references too, which I have to allow myself because the _Fallout_ series does, especially in _Fallout 2_. I'd name or list them but then I feel like they couldn't be funny.

Re: gun stuff: Have any of you read "_The Four Horsemen of the Post-Apocalypse_?" It used to be up here. I recommend it if you like gun stuff. If you can't find it let me know, and if the author consents I'll get it to you somehow. If you like good stories or good writing in general I strongly recommend the author, James Malone's, follow-up, which is still up here, "_The Four Horsemen Ride Again_." Sadly, Goodsprings Scorpion Scramble is longer than "_T4HRA_."

I'm trying for the very first time these synopsis~section title~heading things. I'd love to know what you think of them.

I might've made up a few words.

If you have any questions feel free to ask me and I'll try to answer. I don't expect any questions, I'm just saying go ahead. I'm always curious why people chose certain things, or how they thought of stuff but they almost always seem completely unapproachable.


	2. VII

**TW:** Sex and language.

* * *

**VII**

_Boast — Whiskey Rose — History — Strip — Digits — Oral — Reconciliation — Movies — The Lovers_

Back at the Lucky 38 that night all of them were hanging out and talking and drinking in the rec room. Raúl and Arcade were playing pool, which Arcade was good at. Others were standing around the pool table watching or sitting at the big round wood table in the room, which Titus had moved close to the pool table alone in a display of masculinity enjoyed by many. Rex chewed on a bone and occasionally chased a tennis ball and brought it back to Titus. Titus and Olivia drank, relatively little. Cass drank a lot even for her. Raúl and Arcade drank. Titus let Rex drink a little beer (Rex liked it), Lily said she shouldn't drink, and ED-E couldn't.

Everyone talked at once.

Someone had the jukebox playing a little too loud on random, though you could queue certain songs. Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" was about a minute in. Titus suspected Abba's "Dancing Queen" would soon follow. Or maybe the Smiths or the Scissor Sisters, Arcade had been into them lately. Cass liked mostly country and honky tonk; They could expect some country radio pop. Titus liked everything. Lately he'd been into Daft Punk, of course, and Moby and blur and the Smashing Pumpkins, especially their song about whores. Raúl mostly liked telenovela score soundtracks.

At some point, flushed nice and red, Cass started talking loudly about how back when it was just her and Titus they had sex together, which embarrassed Titus and made him uncomfortable. Cass didn't care. She also spoke very highly of his prowess as a lover and his dick and his body, which helped him feel better about it.

Olivia didn't like it one bit; People slept around in the wasteland, but she didn't have to approve of it—she certainly didn't at the moment—even if she did it too.

Olivia had been sitting on Titus's lap draped about him, and they had their arms around each other, but when Cass got to sex, after a few seconds of it Olivia sat up—Titus thought she'd leave, shun him, that suddenly she hated him—and then reaffirmed her arm around his back possessively, like "_my_ man." In that short time, he'd become sure she'd disown him because he'd had sex with someone in the past, inconveniently someone he still had contact with, although the two of them, Cass and Titus, had never officially been a couple or anything like that. The sex had been more hookup and occasional convenient booty call than romance, erotic more than loving, physical more than emotional, though they'd always cared about each other. They'd considered themselves friends, in an open relationship.

Cass said some things that were true, some things that weren't and some things he hadn't known, like her angle on things, and how much more pleased she'd been by him than he'd ever known, which was nice, but Cass enjoyed exaggeration, and indulged in it then. When she started boasting, he couldn't let her get away with it anymore. He later felt pretty bad about speaking up, but then it'd seemed like he had to defend himself.

"And he came _every_ time! Usually more than once!" Cass said. He wondered why she'd even say that.

"Not every time," Titus said, kind of angry. "More like 60 percent of the time."

"What!?" Cass said loudly. It hurt Titus and Olivia and Arcade's ears. Cass seemed genuinely surprised, but she also exaggerated the surprise.

Titus shouldn't have said the figure out loud. It was accurate; He'd rounded up.

He shrugged, incredibly self-conscious and sweating suddenly as he remembered Olivia was on top of him. She was tall, and she'd been putting on muscle and losing fat lately. She used to be lighter.

"I know we haven't done it in a while," he said to Cass, "but I liked having sex with you, Cass. I—" To say more on the subject he sat up straight and leaned closer to Cass, feeling embarrassed all the while—but, just about shockingly to him, Olivia didn't reject him then either, or even move away from him. As he spoke to Cass he put an arm around Olivia's ridiculous thin curvy waist to protect her from what he was saying, remembered suddenly how tiny she felt and how he kind of liked that though she was about 5'8", and then paused and looked at Olivia, into her eyes; He interrupted himself talking to Cass to say to Olivia, feeling awful, "I'm sorry for talking about this."

"It's okay," she said quietly, looking back into his eyes. He could tell from her eyes that she was feeling insecure, or threatened, but he couldn't imagine why. "It's . . . Things happen," Olivia said. "I've been with other people too. We have to deal with it. For us."

Titus nodded to her smiling, touched and affirmed more than he could express.

As Olivia spoke only for him, Cass loudly piped in, "What are you talking about, Titus?" not hearing Olivia.

"You're not super-awesome at sex, Cass," Titus said. He didn't mean what he said as an insult. Cass was lying to herself. Maybe someone needed to tell her; reality check. _Don't say she's bad_, he told himself. "You're not bad. But you're _not_ super-awesome. I'm sorry. You were almost always _really_ drunk, and that can help lower inhibitions, but with you, you just get sloppy and disconnected, like you either don't know how I'm feeling, or just don't care. Maybe that's what you're really like. Most of the time you didn't seem to notice or care if I was even enjoying myself."

Cass snatched her current bottle of whiskey off the table and stormed out of the room without saying anything, except for a telling angry glare at Titus.

_Nope, that was the wrong thing to say too_, Titus thought. Shit. He took a second, looking to ask Olivia to climb off of him—and she was already looking at him, concerned, and she said, "You should go talk to her," as he turned to her.

"I was gonna ask you to get up so I could go do that," Titus said.

She nodded. "That's good."

Titus nodded back. "I shouldn't have said any of that."

"If it's true maybe she should know," Olivia said, not hating him, and clambered off of him, only briefly grinding a heel someplace uncomfortable. "There's a lot of delusion in the Mojave." He got up.

Titus felt worse now than when Cass was only talking about having sex with him in some detail in front of Olivia, whom he was in love with, and everyone.

Titus said to all of them, "I'm gonna go talk to her."

When it was just Cass and him they were close, and used to have sex a lot. Then they didn't do it anymore. She never told him why; He had guesses, but hadn't been able to verify any. Cass could probably tell that Olivia and Titus liked each other a lot. More than liked. Titus was pretty sure Olivia had talked about that and him and more with Cass; he knew that sometimes Olivia talked to Cass about things rather than talking to him. Lately the balance had shifted more to Titus than Cass. He loved being closer to Olivia, but didn't want to take anything from Cass, and he also hated competing for someone's attention, or depending on their approval; a fool's game.

After Titus said he was going to go talk to Cass, he got a few looks. "Seriously, just talk," he said. "No, I actually meant that."

The jukebox was playing music on random; As Titus walked into the guest room, the early 21st century Lana del Rey song "Off to the Races" started.

On the opposite side of the presidential suite from the rec room, Cass was sitting up in the bed she normally used in the guest room, the first one closer to the entryway, and she was, strangely, crying, alternately sobbing and swigging whiskey and sometimes both at the same time. Titus saw that in the few seconds of long strides it took him to reach her. She was clearly not only crying about what had just happened. He'd seen Cass cry a few times, but it hadn't been like this.

"I'm sorry for what I said," Titus told her, meaning it; and stopping short, not sitting next to her yet. Not until she wanted him to.

There was plenty of space for both of them on the bed. It was a double, or maybe queen-size. Titus could never keep pre-war bed sizes straight.

He accidentally recalled the past; some of the times back when they'd been breaking in the suite and its furniture, beds and couches and chairs and tables and other surfaces. He didn't consider doing it now, it just went by his mind's eye. He shut it out.

As Cass looked up at Titus, for less than a second he saw a dangerous look in her eyes he recognized, from her in the past and from hundreds of other people as well, like she was thinking about exactly the same thing he'd just been.

Then her expression changed; She was sad, whatever impulses she might've had.

"Why didn't you tell me? Thought I was always awesome and hot!" Cass said, voice heavy, sounding desperate and crying again, tears streaming down her tanned face, eyes reddened and glimmering in the room's opulent but dim lighting.

He wasn't sure how to answer her. As he thought about it she patted the spot next to her on the bed. Inconveniently, what she'd said registered as funny to him right then. He hugged her before sitting down, and couldn't wipe the grin off his face, at what she'd said, quick enough. She watched him closely: she saw the grin, but she guessed what caused it. Yeah, she'd sounded absurd. He didn't find it was funny that she was distraught.

He crawled over her body rather than walking around the bed, and her belly did this flip, from the proximity and weight and him brushing up against her and his warmth, and just his smell, familiar yet new, maybe a new cologne, and from other things she couldn't identify.

She didn't quite notice herself burping, then, but Titus did and ignored that and the alcohol on her breath, then sat and put his arm around her comfortingly and held her. He was a good friend. She wasn't sure if he was a better friend or lover, or which one she wanted right now. He always had his shoulders held high, something she found incredibly attractive, and which she didn't notice many guys doing. Most people seemed so downtrodden.

When he put his arm around her she leaned into him without hesitation, trusting him, comfortable with him, whatever else was going on. He felt tears seep through his shirt.

He ran a hand through her hair, only noticing afterward that she had her hair down, which was rare, out of its eternal bun, loose and curly and orange-red. Her face was flushed: Whiskey Rose. He drew his fingers through her hair some more, taking his time, careful not to tug at any snags, not trying to make her talk.

She'd taken her gloves off, too. She didn't do that much. He wondered why. He wondered if she knew he'd come in here to comfort her, or if she'd only suspected and hoped he would.

Her brown suede jacket was on the floor against the wall, flung away.

Only the pink and white plaid button-up long-sleeved shirt she always wore and seldom washed covered the top half of her body now, and it was unbuttoned even further than normal—normal was halfway down, three of six buttons done. So it mostly wasn't together and was covering little of her chest and belly. Her bra was exposed.

Titus didn't think the thing with the buttons was an accident, but by the time he noticed that consciously it seemed like she'd already forgot about doing it. She wasn't bending her chest toward him or anything, just crying, though he accidentally looked down her shirt once and saw a lot of skin and hated himself for doing it, even unwittingly, at a moment like this. She was vulnerable.

She'd tugged off her cowboy boots—Ariat, if he remembered right—also rare for her, even when she was in bed. She didn't wear socks. Her feet smelled unpleasant from a distance.

"I didn't do it right, obviously, but I tried to tell you," Titus said. "Mostly I didn't think you could take the ego blow so I stopped trying. You act like you don't care but you do."

Sometimes it irritated Cass that Titus could see through her.

"Fuckin' A," Cass slurred, sounding tired.

"Also your nipples are weird," Titus said. "You usually always deliberately got _so_ drunk first that I didn't think you cared, either; Like whether you were any good, or if I ever came or not. Like you wanted not to care. I didn't know what I should do. I could never get you to talk about sex with me, or even consent."

Cass didn't understand the concept of consent, and certainly not a better subset he liked to call enthusiastic consent, though he'd explained and explained consent to her, and even had some of his friends at the Gomorrah talk to her about it. It hadn't helped.

"You say something about my nipples?" Cass said. She leaned and fell into him somewhat as she spoke, draping herself over his chest; to him, it was uncomfortably similar to something Olivia had been doing moments ago. Maybe that's what gave Cass the idea.

"No," Titus said.

Cass looked up at him, seeming not to hear what he just said or what she just asked, then her head crashed back down against him and she cried more for a minute or so, letting herself go and sobbing and getting it out. At some point she farted, but she'd been aiming away from him and it wasn't bad. It was probably good she was so comfortable.

She paused and moved and took a big swig of whiskey. She'd definitely noticed herself farting. Her bottle was mostly empty. Titus kept his arms around her.

"Cass, alcohol is a depressant," he said.

"Fuck's that mean?" she said, sniffling.

"It means like makes your body sad," he said.

"You saying . . . _don't_ keep drinking more?" Cass said. "Don't drown my sorrows in booze? Is that's what's you're saying? It's not gonna make me forget all my troubles . . . " she trailed off.

"You know it won't," Titus said.

She cried hard for a few minutes and he held her, snugly. He could tell she was feeling better already, on the way up. That was good. She took another swig of alcohol and he let her, then she cried more, then she started to take another swig and stopped herself and wiped tears off her face and set the whiskey bottle on the nightstand by the bed. Titus had to let her go for her to reach it, and he accidentally watched her round little ass shift and mold when she was leaning on her side. Then she came back and he held her and she cried some more.

She pulled her head up and looked in Titus's eyes for a few seconds, and between the two of them, searching. Playing too loudly on the jukebox at that moment was the Roxy Music song "More Than This."

And, not only because of the portentous, supposedly random song choice, he saw it coming but somehow couldn't stop her; He wasn't sure why; he didn't need it emotionally, but she did: She kissed him forcefully, grabbing him a little hard by the back of his head with one snaking arm, and grasping her fingers in his hair, too hard, and pulling him into her, and pushing her tongue into his mouth and waggling her tongue inside of it.

Titus didn't like it. They hadn't talked about it. She didn't ask him if he wanted to. He let her go at him for a couple seconds, hopefully ridding herself of the urge, then pushed her off gently.

Not to be refused, Cass said, "Wanted to thank you," wriggling her hips and the wedge of her pelvis into him and leaning closer and pushing her tits into him and pulling her shirt open. Her eyes went from her own body, and the broadening range of skin of her chest on display, and the room's shadows playing on her, then back up to his eyes, need and hunger in hers.

Cass genuinely didn't like to talk about consent "or any'a that shit," as she put it, before sex; she liked to just _do_ it, get right to it, and she normally didn't like much foreplay before the proper rutting, either. The scant technically-foreplay they'd already engaged in would've been about enough. (It was foreplay to her even if it wasn't to him.) Time taken getting clothes off counted as foreplay too, unless they initiated penetrative sex before getting all of it off—which they used to do sometimes, especially with quickies.

Titus knew Cass's opinions on sex and values and preferences and how she liked her clit touched and stuff from long experience; He'd known Cass for months before he met Olivia, before Olivia came to the area. He wasn't sure how long it had been exactly, maybe six to eight months. Maybe less. He and Cass had packed a _lot_ of sex together into that time, some of it good, some of it really good, some of it not good. It had been a relatively healthy sexual relationship between two consenting, occasionally drunk adults like any other.

Except after a month or two Titus noticed a problem: they'd have sex, but he'd often not even get off once. Also she talked funny. Early on, during some instances of sex he'd reached orgasm two or three times, or more.

He naturally assumed it was all his fault when suddenly that stopped happening. He'd had an awful lot of sex in a lot of different ways with an awful lot of different partners, sometimes multiple partners at once, throughout his life. He'd been a prostitute for more than a year, against his will for at least the first month; He'd been good with guns since he was young—not long after his dad gave him his first BB gun he'd converted it to fully-automatic—and he was a good fighter now, but he hadn't been then, unarmed or with mêlée weapons. Now he had a lot of staying power, or endurance, or stamina, whatever you called it to take a while to come. He had sex very frequently now, too, usually not going more than a few days without, often less than one day or a few hours. He just figured he had too much staying power or whatever built up.

Back in the present at that moment, on the Lucky 38 presidential suite's jukebox the Rolling Stones song "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" came on.

Unsure what else to do back then, Titus had tested hypotheses and reviewed observations and collated data as best he could, and learned there were at least a few issues at play: specific ones too, but the main problems were that he was just in much better shape than her, and she was skinny but in awful shape, that their relationship wasn't new anymore, that he had too much staying power, that Cass drank way too much, and mostly that she just didn't care if he enjoyed himself, regardless of orgasm numbers.

Titus came to the conclusion that he was kind of on his own regarding his pleasure. He'd have to take it for himself to get it, because Cass wasn't going to give it to him, and to be fair frequently wasn't able to.

She'd never told him he wanted to go for too long, or confronted him about taking too long to get off, but she must've thought about it; Couples, straight gay or other, didn't commonly have sex for longer than an hour, he knew; much less than that, actually, closer to a half hour, or less. He had so much sex his staying power was on the far high end. Apparently once proper sex began most guys didn't last more than five to seven minutes, according to research—only a very small portion of which he'd physically been there for—He couldn't take seven minutes or less now if he tried.

He'd considered his and Cass's sexual history as impartially as he could and realized that Cass's completion rate with him—times they had sex when he had at least one orgasm—was low; surprisingly low to him, once he started keeping track. Of course, he'd probably biased that sample: by thinking about getting off, surely sometimes he kind of made himself not get off for better statistical significance. In the same time, Cass had always come more than once; Three times, on average. Titus usually didn't even worry about orgasms, specifically, his or his partner's/partners', or whether he got off at all. It hadn't been a problem for him, that he could ever remember.

He coped with this new problem in a number of ways.

He also became a little obsessed with orgasms.

First, he naturally talked with Cass about it openly several times, while they were sober as well as drunk; That hadn't helped.

Then he tried a couple of initiatives simultaneously. He hung out with Cass less, for one. For another, he slept with a lot of other people more; people he knew and people he didn't know, and people he had histories of hooking up with; for example Melissa, a Great Khan, a bit of a cumslut and kind of his girlfriend—_his_ cumslut—though he and Melissa had a very open non-monogamous relationship; It'd begun as casual sex between two enthusiastically consenting adult partners, but became more. As it happened, he and Melissa still had exactly the same relationship, though now she was also pregnant with his child, and the Khans as a group intended to leave the Mojave soon. He'd also hooked up with Red Lucy, the dark beautiful primal master of the Thorn underground on the west side of Las Vegas into bloodplay, and the agoraphobic but very sexually adventurous Sarah Weintraub, of Vault 21 on the Strip, and some of his many friends who worked in the sex industry, mostly at the Gomorrah, and were eager to please him anyway because they just loved sex and him.

The Gomorrah was the Strip's hotel/casino/den of vice/brothel, which had entire rooms and an open courtyard for group stuff, infrequently orgies, and relatively normal cheaper voyeur stuff, like mirrored walls and ceilings in some rooms, and equipment to indulge in and embrace lots of different fetishes common, for normal people who couldn't get it elsewhere, and uncommon, like for catering to big spenders and high rollers at the casino to keep them spending and coming. Titus had cleaned up the Gomorrah and installed new leadership there months before, on his own initiative; a madame he'd known in Georgia ran the place now, along with some smart but not crazy or even especially greedy lieutenants who were members of the place's ruling group, the Omertas, a tribe of common raiders called the Slither Kin before Mr. House organized and remade them and the Strip, who pretended they were family. The former Gomorrah and Omerta heads, Nero and Big Sal, and their crooked lieutenant Cachino, were all dead. The place had a pre-war mudflap silhouette logo of two hot- tight-bodied big-breasted quite thin curvy-figured naked women with big asses, and these road signs that sometimes turned him on just looking at them, _"Holster your weapon . . . at Gomorrah" (implicit: in doggy style), oh my god_, he'd think, looking at a skinny yet curvy woman's bottom half, then have to act it out with Cass or somebody.

He'd also worked some shifts, as a prostitute again, in Gomorrah—most johns tipped him well, but his friends there wouldn't let him refuse a salary, like the other workers got now because of him.

All the socializing and sexing with different people, from the prostitution of his body especially, helped a lot.

Another countermeasure he tried was to remember not to make himself last during sex, which he did so much by then he was just used to doing, holding out by default, like the way he used to suck in his belly. That tactic helped too.

Titus had become obsessed with orgasms at that time as a result of the deficiency; He still thought about them too much, though because he'd been with a lot of other people, rather than exclusive with Cass, he'd got much better about it, about just enjoying sex and doing it well and making the other person or people feel good and pleasing them.

Which was why as he thought of some of his and Cass's sexual experiences together he thought of orgasms, and vividly recalled some moments of semen flying from his body on or into Cass's, like shooting it on her tits or across her face, long ropes of cum covering from her lips to over and past one of her eyes, which she'd fortunately closed before it hit, before some of the hot thick stuff ran back down and past her lips into her open mouth. She'd tasted it then swallowed it. Occasionally he really wanted to do naughty things to Cass, like that, come on her and play with it afterward, or come in her, carefully pushing himself not-too-deeply inside so it could come back out and they could play with it afterward, making it a creampie.

Probably because he could hook up with just about anybody anytime, Titus hardly ever masturbated. It never occurred to him to just jerk off; Nor masturbate mutually with Cass, who at that point in their relationship, though, probably would've wanted to just fuck him after a few minutes of it.

Sometimes Cass would be tired, get to one last orgasm and collapse and fall asleep, like normal, and once he could tell she was done he'd just immediately start jerking off. It was that simple almost every time, simple relief, but sometimes Cass would notice what he was doing, and empathize or feel charitable, then help him out somehow: sucking the head of his cock while she was half-asleep and while he worked the rest of his shaft and his balls, and then he'd come in her mouth and she'd swallow his load before conking out, and he'd kiss her without hesitating and go to sleep with them both feeling satisfied; or a few times she'd lie on her back on their bed, or whatever surface, and lick and suck his balls, and he'd stand above her, above or over her head or to the side, and jerk off and spray his load over her chest and neck—giving her a shimmering white pearl necklace—and tits and belly too, if it was big or shot far, which it was and did often.

A few times she'd done nothing for him, recovering from multiple orgasms and tired and drunk like normal, but then when he reached orgasm he'd used her as a good old-fashioned cum dumpster, like by shooting it into her mouth and telling her to swallow it all, which she gladly always had and would've done on her own anyway. Sometimes saying it out loud made doing it more exciting. Sometimes she even helped drain out the last drops. Sometimes she played with his cum a little before swallowing, like letting it spill out onto her tits or pushing it up with her tongue for him to see. She often did such things that at times when he wasn't really feeling it, somehow, but he always liked when she was proud of what she'd helped produce, and didn't reject his cum, or that she thought he liked her to play with it, anyway. Sometimes she gagged. Oddly, he couldn't remember her ever complaining about the taste of his cum, which he got very self-conscious about sometimes, though to be fair sometimes he didn't care if it tasted bad or good, he was just gonna put it where he wanted to, like by dumping it in her.

He went down on her almost every time they had sex; it would have been every time, but sometimes she hadn't let him. "Just fuck me" was her normal line, as she pulled him up and grabbed his fat cock and lined it up with her pussy. This seemed fair somehow, he hoped, his coming in her mouth or whatever. She certainly didn't have a problem with it.

Once or twice she'd anticipated him needing to finish himself off and had posed for him and told him to come on her, and played with her little tits and jammed them together, among other things, loving just watching him get himself off, watching him watch her while she didn't even have to exert herself, just using her body passively. It was surprisingly intimate sometimes. She found it rather more satisfying than he liked, but at least he got off then. He didn't complain about her not bothering to try to get him off during the proper act of sex between them—not necessarily vaginal penetrative sex, just the main act.

The afterplay crap, of Titus getting himself off afterward, only so he wouldn't go completely unsatisfied, eventually became, on most occasions, a whole other part of the main act of intercourse, the new normal. He didn't look at it that way, but he could tell she did. Titus hated that it became a regular part of sex for them, but tried to shrug off as sort of a "you take what you're given." At least he got off. Sometimes they'd start having sex again after it—go for round two—and while that was rare, it helped make up for the many times they didn't start up again.

Titus's next method of coping came about because of the previous one. By doing that, fucking her good but not reaching completion himself, and then forcing himself to come at the end by hook or by crook, he eventually got bored, and without even meaning to he invented a new technique of basically jerking himself off using Cass's body. Sometimes it got a little messy, but they both liked it.

They used the him jerking himself off in/with Cass method with variations. Sometimes she'd officially finish, but then she'd get into, for her, some easy position, sometimes of his choosing, and then she'd just lay there, or hold herself up on her hands and knees or whatever—she most enjoyed the doggy style variation—and she'd try not to fall asleep, and he'd keep fucking her until he was satisfied enough to quit too. Or usually just until he achieved orgasm. She still fell asleep sometimes.

The alternate-position variations, where he basically fucked her instead of jerking himself off using her body, sometimes gave him pretty good orgasms, which were always a surprise. On a few occasions she even found the energy to start up again and fucked him properly, some more, making his orgasm much better, but more importantly often actually satisfying him, which was all any of the shit was about—something she didn't seem to understand, or maybe willfully ignored.

A few times Titus really enjoyed whatever particular variation of that, jerking himself off somehow in Cass while she was too worn out to do anything, so much that he'd come then keep going until he came again. The follow-up orgasm's load of cum wouldn't be as impressive or voluminous as the first one that he took forever to get to, but usually neither of them was in the mood or awake enough for much cumplay by then, so it usually didn't matter. Titus was almost always self-conscious about the size of his load, not just the taste, and sometimes even the consistency or other aspects. Most women hardly noticed or didn't notice, though some did. Guys were often more aware, having to deal with it themselves, but that wasn't necessarily helpful or good. Rarely, people actually liked to play with his cum, or taste it; or whatever exactly, do something with it. Titus wasn't always in the mood for participating in that but sometimes he wanted to, or enjoyed it or watching it, and if someone enjoyed what came from him it just made him all happy inside. Cass never cared . . . though sometimes, she had to admit, on occasions when she'd indulge in cumplay with him and get into it, a big cum load could be a really nice—and hot and thick and sweet and bitter, with a touch of salt—reward at the end of sex.

Cass wasn't a size queen, but Titus had a really big dick, as long and thick as she'd ever had, and sometimes she just loved to have a guy with a big dick fuck the hell out of her.

They'd never become a couple. They'd advanced enough to try out roleplaying and fantasies, they were comfortable with each other; and in a regular sex session after they got a little used to each other, and built up Cass's stamina, they'd typically use several different sex positions; and on a good night they might both have more than one orgasm, Cass usually several times as many as him, not only because she never had a refractory period, though she wanted to take breaks sometimes.

In their first few months of having sex they occasionally tried out new things just for variety, and fun, though that stopped before long. For example, sometimes they'd put arbitrary restrictions on themselves, challenged themselves: like, for the whole encounter they could use any position they wanted but Titus's cock could never go into Cass any further than the head, or no face-to-face positions (Cass's idea), or no man-dominating woman-supplicating subservient positions (Titus's idea), or only standing positions, or Titus couldn't touch his cock no matter what else they did, or Cass couldn't touch her clit, or they could only use their hands on each other.

For whatever reason, two good memories of fingering Cass seemed to coalesce in Titus's mind as Cass came onto him then, one in his crappy motel room in Novac and one in the Ultra-Luxe's restaurant the Gourmand.

"You don't hafta fuck me to thank me," Titus said, back in the present. Cass hadn't changed since the last time they had sex. The look in her eyes now was exciting, but somehow the rest of her was putting him off. He added, "Not that I wouldn't enjoy a 60 percent chance of orgasm."

Writhing into him, climbing up him and kind of mounting him, Cass said "Shut up" and punched his arm, joking. She knew he was joking too. Then, not quite getting it, she undulated on him and said, "I wanna fuck."

Titus said, "I don't. It doesn't feel right."

Cass said, "But I'm horny."

Titus said, "_I'm_ not."

Cass clutched at his soft dick through his pants.

"No, Cass," Titus said. "I want to be with Olivia."

Cass said, "Well she hasn't staked her claim on you yet, has she?"

"No, she hasn't," Titus said, but he felt like lying.

"Then _fuck_ me," Cass said. She loved saying "fuck." Grinding on him a little hard, she said, "You can think about her, I don't care. You'll know it's me. You know I got a tight pussy."

"It's not that tight," Titus said.

"What?" Cass said.

"Nothin,'" Titus said. _You're loose, Cass_, he thought; He nearly said some of it: _For me, relatively. I know I have a big dick. I don't care that you're loose. Just don't get full of yourself. I don't know why but I hate that. "Loose" even before I've fucked you senseless and busted a nut in you. It's like you've had a couple kids_.

Cass adjusted on top of him. She stopped grinding and rest her weight on him. She put her head in his neck where it met his shoulder. She kissed his cheek then his lips. Then she started writhing on him and started grabbing his cock, and said after it hadn't hardened or started to, "What's wrong? Can't get it up for mama? _I'll_ get it hard."

Titus politely pushed her hand away, and instead of saying _Don't say mama_, he said, "It would be up if I wanted it to be." He hoped she'd get the message.

He'd barely known his mother, and had trouble remembering her now. Thinking of her normally made him sad. He remembered what she looked like. He'd heard of Electra and Oedipus and even experienced it in transference onto him or among friends, especially at the whorehouse, but he'd never wanted to fuck his mother. He tolerated it if that was somebody else's kink or fetish or whatever, he didn't judge anyone for it; just like with things he didn't happen to be into, such as what he liked to call "bathroom stuff," but it, mother or father stuff, didn't do anything for him and sometimes it kinda put him off, as now.

Cass's memory of their sex life was fuzzy, he knew. His wasn't. He'd never had trouble getting it up with Cass, or anyone, even at his very most drunk or high, even back when he hadn't known what any of it meant at all very early in his life in one of the many occasions of people sexually abusing him, when his body had betrayed him. He wasn't sure why he'd never had that problem, erectile dysfunction; apparently it was common—and he'd seen other guys experience it, whether they were his johns or others'. If they were his he usually proceeded to work their prostate, which he was a professional with. _Something Freudian_, he figured; _genital fixation stage?_ He wasn't a fan of Freud because of what Freud thought of women, but some things just stuck.

Titus kissed Cass on her face on the outside cheek and hugged her and held her. She brightened back up. It might've been a feint, the acting sad thing, and if it was he'd fallen for it. "I'll probably always really like you, Cass," he said. "And I care about you. But I don't wanna do this. I'm not really in the mood, either, as you can tell." She'd gone back to rubbing his cock with one of her hands, he'd noticed; It wasn't hardening.

Cass said, "I'll let you come on my face."

Thinking _Where did that even come from?_, Titus said, "Cass, if I wanted to I'd do that anyway."

She knew it was true—she liked for some small things to be coerced or forced a little—and that when he'd done that to/on her in the past he'd usually always told her clearly he was going to do it, not just went and done it, so she could say no, and when he did she'd always liked it, even once when it felt a little demeaning and made her feel a little dirty in a bad way, which she hadn't told him about but which he'd picked up on anyway somehow and then apologized for doing. He'd proceeded to gently wipe it all off of her, and make her just like new. He didn't stick her with the cleanup like some people did, either. She loved that. And sometimes she'd loved taking a shot to the face, and he'd always graciously done whatever else she wanted to do with his cum afterward, cleaning her with a shirt of his or a towel, however big the load; or even licking it off of her a few times when she told him to, though he wasn't into it, and he'd never deliberately shot any cum in her eyes (accidentally, once).

She tried to make a scandalized face at him now anyway for saying that. They both knew she was only being dramatic; it didn't fool him for a second. She couldn't do nothing, though. He'd just taken another illusion from her, the great conjurer; one of control.

Titus was confused by the way she was acting, and noticed she was getting desperate but he couldn't tell why.

Cass kissed him on the mouth again, sloppily, too wetly; an invasion of her tongue in places he didn't want it.

"Cass . . . no," Titus said. Now he felt like crying.

He picked her up bodily, lifting her easily, then got up off the bed, carried her along then set her back down on the bed, with her body prone, lying back, not sitting up.

When he first lifted her she was already breathing harder. She thought he had something very different in mind. Titus wasn't that drunk, and though he felt the temptation, even then his body wasn't responding to her, despite all the signals she and her body were sending him, consciously and unconsciously.

Cass said, "Fuck me, Titus."

He unbuttoned the rest of her shirt, one button. He wished it wasn't almost open already for some reason. He leaned over her. Normally by this point he would've taken off his PIP-Boy. Her belly expanded and sucked in rapidly with her breathing before his hands even got to her. He felt the heat of her body and the tension in her through her shirt. Every other second her tits surged back up. Which was just a coincidence, but for his libido both a perfectly and a poorly-timed one.

She writhed, and started touching her pussy, hurriedly reaching around him, with a few fingers of one of her hands, unable to wait for him, over her pants. She also started caressing his chest with her other hand, and using one of her legs to drag along his side and ass and stroke him and urge him on to more. Sometimes she did all three things at once, sometimes only one or two, all for less than a minute. Her breathing quickened some more. She felt hot, especially as he got closer to where her legs met.

One of his hands slipped and went out against her belly. She moaned, sort of a loud drawn-out breath. She said, "Come on. Put your dick in me." She smiled up at him, gazing into his eyes, sure he'd cave in and give it to her at any second and enjoying that too, the risk, the danger of him taking control and having his way with her.

He felt like everyone was watching him suddenly, not only her, and not because he hadn't bothered to close the room's door. He felt watched and judged in a bad way, a not-at-all-exciting, shameful one. He said "god dammit" gruffly.

Cass didn't seem to notice what he said. In a weird way, this would sometimes happen with them: she was so into it that by that point she was only dimly aware there was another person in the room; she kind of just wanted to lie back and feel good for a half hour, or two hours or the whole night, and not particularly think about or try to please him. She could almost be alone. "What?" she said, distant.

He'd finished unbuttoning her shirt in all of two seconds. She never tucked it in. He undid her big silver belt buckle and ripped her belt out of its loops on her pants successfully in one strong pull, which surprised them both. Titus spoke as he removed her belt: "Shut up, Cass." He was kind of joking, because sometimes she liked stuff like that, and was mostly using his voice to get her hotter. It worked.

Her eyes went wide and she gasped, at what he said and his getting the belt all the way out in one pull. She breathed harder, panting a little, excited, the soft old plaid shirt she always wore falling away to the sides, her bra completely exposed, her belly and chest and tits rising and falling rapidly, her ribs showing.

Smiling, Cass said, "I like it when you get forceful."

Titus half-grinned. He straightened up and said, "Take all your clothes off. I'll be back in 30 seconds."

Cass didn't hear or chose to ignore the second part of what he said. Pleased by the first part, though, she said, "Do you wanna watch?," as in "watch me take my clothes off."

"I'm gonna go tell everybody what I'm about to do," he said, but didn't say no.

"What?" Cass said, not hearing him, closing and re-opening her shirt and revealing her tits for him a few times, her lips and her eyes smiling up at him brightly.

She slid her legs apart.

Intuitively, reflexively and before he could think he palmed her pussy with one of his hands, which even through her pants was deliciously hot, and she undulated against him a little hard to feel it through her jeans. She moaned. She hadn't known he'd react that way. He kept his fingers over her and rubbed his thumb over about where her clit would've been and said, "Just take your clothes off. I'll be back in 30 seconds. . . . And leave the lights on."

She moaned at the thumb on her clit, even if it was only the hood and over clothing, and squirmed, already ready for him, one hand on one of her tits while the other went back down between her legs, trying to catch his hand there and missing it. Then she started touching herself over her pants again, biting her lip and trying to keep her eyes open to watch Titus, her gaze wandering slowly over his body to the parts she liked most and lingering. She watched his eyes rake over her. She felt his look like a wave of heat.

She didn't necessarily like to not get her way, but something about him just telling her what to do and this teasing and so far denial was really doing it for her, getting her hotter.

"We're gonna start when I get back, so try to be ready for me," he said, not touching her, and she moaned again just thinking about it, anticipating, and enjoying what he said, too.

"_Titus_," Cass said mid-moan, sharing her arousal with him. She also didn't want him to leave the room and realized he was about to.

As he walked out he checked himself over: No clothing missing; dick not hard. All good.

Cass unbuttoned her jeans and licked a few of her fingers and slid her hand under her pants and panties to her skin and reached low, feeling hairs shaved short a couple days ago growing back out, and touched herself, her pussy and her clit, rubbing and pinching and circling and pulling, then using her other hand to work one of her nipples over her bra. "Titus," she said to him again, begging.

He went back to the rec room, leaving the guest room door open. He heard Cass moaning some more, and thought he heard these wonderful quiet wet sounds.

To everyone in the rec room he said, "Cass is acting sorta weird right now. I'm gonna finger her." They were surprised when he came back in. "No, just quick right now."

Olivia gasped, hopefully not so loudly that he heard it, shocked at how he just came out and said it.

Titus heard her gasp but it didn't affect him. He felt bad and guilty and embarrassed already. Cass was his friend, not his lover. He just wanted to take care of her. It wasn't about him. "I'm sorry, guys," he said, particularly to Olivia but meaning it for all of them, even ED-E.

"We could hear her crying," Raúl said.

"We were concerned, but we knew she was fine because she was with you," Arcade said.

"_Is_ she okay?" Olivia said.

"I'm gonna take care of her," Titus said, nodding. "I just don't want her to attack anyone else like she just did me."

"She _what_?" Olivia said sternly.

"Whoa!" Raúl said.

It took Titus a second to catch up with her; He didn't see why she was so mad. Then he realized he'd chosen his words badly. "Sexually," he said, "not with a weapon."

He sounded sad; Not sure what was going on and confused, Olivia's heart still went out to him.

"Did you just say you were gonna fingerbang Cass?" Raúl said.

"I'll close the door," Titus said. "Try to ignore the noise, okay? It won't be long."

He didn't seem excited about it. He had this look about him like he was traumatized, and also like he was a doctor with a patient in urgent care that he needed to sedate.

Titus saw Rex making a face at him. "Don't look at me like that, Rex," he said.

From their perspective: He walked away, a door closed, then there were a lot of feminine breathy noises they heard even over the jukebox, then the noises got louder and louder and became moans and groans and more, and sure enough two minutes later Cass got loud then went quiet, falling off a peak. They thought they heard Titus talking low, but he never got breathy or groaney. A door opened and closed, somebody washed up in the bathroom, and Titus came back into the rec room looking nonplussed in the American sense.

"I didn't wanna do it, I wasn't in the mood, it felt wrong, and just no," he said.

It was different in his perspective, and graphic and sad. But he really cared about Cass and wanted her to feel good. And he was in a position to use one of his talents for good. That didn't happen very much.

He went back into the guest room, and on the way, before he got to work on Cass, took off his PIP-Boy, which didn't take long—not longer than putting one on did—and removed the control glove under it too. If you got into PIP-Boys much, early on you usually figured out how to take off the damn clunky things. Titus had known people much better with PIP-Boys than him, some who'd figured them out despite never coming across so much as an operator's manual, as well as people not nearly as good as him with them, and most of both groups had figured out the removal. Then again, a few people, including ones better than him with PIP-Boys, had also believed it wasn't even possible to take one off, and other such myths. Titus turned the little computer off and put it on a table in the suite's hall.

As Titus went from the rec room back to the guest room, taking off his PIP-Boy, the jukebox started playing "Hypnotize U," a song by No-one Ever Really Dies—N*E*R*D—produced by two of the band, under their older name The Neptunes, as well as by one of Titus's favorite bands, the French duo Daft Punk.

In the guest room Cass was still lying on the same bed, on her back, still writhing, occasionally pushing her pelvis up into the air, pulling her legs in, touching herself, enjoying herself, and had pulled her pants down, but only to her knees, and her panties were still on, though she'd done everything else he asked; a good sign. She didn't want to tease him. She wanted to come.

She was ready and waiting for him and glistening, soaking wet. There was a dark spot beneath her on the sheets. She was moaning quietly—little more than labored loud breathing—as he came back in.

Her eyes were closed. She didn't hear him. The top half of her body was naked. Unlike him and Olivia she had no muscle tone to speak of, but a nice belly anyway. She was lucky that way. She'd taken off her hat and shirt and bra, and her nice little B-cups were out, nipples hard and jutting up for his inspection and appreciation.

Titus loved breasts/boobs/tits/waps/etc., especially right now.

He didn't realize he'd stopped moving just to take in the sight of her.

He quickly banished the thought from his head, but for just a moment he considered fucking Cass. Proper fucking. The thought came to him unbidden. He had some condoms in his and Olivia's bedroom, but he knew before considering going to get one that, if he even started moving in that direction for that purpose, he'd be crossing a line he couldn't uncross, a Rubicon between Cass and Olivia that he'd already crossed once the other way, the healthy way.

A small part of Titus's mind, after failing to convince him to go get a condom or two, undiscouraged by failure, reminded him that after a little while in their relationship Cass hadn't even let him use condoms with her anymore. Titus brushed the thought away, but remembered the feeling, which didn't help. Then he resolved not to do it. It would've felt good for a little while even, if he didn't get off; But he would've felt awful as soon as Cass was done, and he couldn't have lied about doing it with her to anyone.

Her eyes opened and acquired him a second after that. Her whole body brightened up, blooming at the sight of him. In a dirty smutty way she was strikingly beautiful, comfortably sensual. He saw some of her juices sticking to and between her fingers and her vulva—she lifted her hand to show him—clear scintillating sticky wetness—one of the dim lights of the room catching it perfectly somehow.

He could see that she'd also wet one of her nipples. He would've liked to watch her do that. She was twisting and squeezing the nipple with her other hand when he looked.

She tensed and smiled, in anticipation of all kinds of things he wouldn't be doing to her. Again he felt guilty. He let go of that; If he let himself feel guilty, he wouldn't do this nearly as well. He smiled back.

He held up one finger to her, like "just one second," and she understood and it thrilled her even more somehow. The deliberation, maybe, that he knew what he wanted. She thought she knew what that was. He went quickly back around the corner and closed and locked the room's door.

"You don't want them to watch us?" Cass said, kind of mid-moan, like a wave of pleasure hit her halfway through the sentence. She hadn't stopped touching herself, or slowed down. She had this even dirtier look on her face now that she was doing it and he was watching.

_No I don't_, he thought, ashamed, but he said, "That's just so you can't get out." _It's enough that you're loud_, he thought, and considered stuffing her panties into her mouth or maybe choking her, which she would've liked.

She moaned again at what he said. And his voice—just his voice did that to her. It was hard to talk to him normally sometimes, especially in the morning or late at night. The meaning of his words now made it even sweeter, headier. She touched herself, loving it, happy, watching his deliberate movements towards her and the hard lines of his shoulders, watching him come close to her, writhing herself, unable to contain her arousal and glad he didn't want her to.

"I'm so wet for you, Titus," she said proudly, almost in a whisper, when he got close, showing him her fingers with her pussy juices on them again.

She was trying to perform, to sound sexy and husky and entice him, but it was real, too. It gave him a mixed message. It did little for him because it was clearly put on, but it was sweet of her, and he liked it, the portion that was true. It didn't arouse him, for no reason he was aware of. He looked at her clinically. _What does she need me to do?_ he thought.

He was thinking that when Cass showed him her sticky fingers, and when he saw her do that, without hesitation he leaned close and took her hand in both of his hands and sucked her wet fingers into his mouth, not touching them with his lips on the way in so he'd get all of her juices. He sucked on them individually, licked them and swirled his tongue around them and stroked them, and sucked her juices off of her and savored the taste and even moaned a little himself. His eyes closed for some of it, but he also looked over her shaking body and into her eyes, hungry for her and watching how he was affecting her. She tasted good. He told her so. She moaned suddenly at that and the feeling of it all. And that she got to have him. He was _so_ fucking good with his mouth.

He used to be a prostitute. Not in Vegas, but somewhere further east. At her insistence and begging he'd told her lots about it on more than one occasion. He hadn't been a slave in the same way they used to be in the Gomorrah, but apparently he might as well have been. Wherever it'd been, the brothel had enjoyed a strangely high position of esteem in the small horrible raider city it was a part of, not the scummy low one the Gomorrah here endured. But for a while he didn't get to choose whom he'd service. He considered himself basically straight but he'd still had to do men about as often as women, as a prostitute. He'd told her about being with johns who were women and men. She didn't know why, but sometimes Cass liked to fantasize about watching him kissing and then passionately fucking another man, or blowing somebody he and she hadn't even met before, presumably expertly, sucking the head and stroking the guy's cock and licking his balls; or maybe fucking a couple of other guys, two or three or four, and Titus easily making them all come, enjoying it, and walking unsteadily back to Cass, who'd be watching it all from their bed, and then he'd fuck her too and finish them both off and sleep with her and just kick the other guys out, done with them.

While Cass entertained ideas, Titus analyzed her. There were so many different things he could do, tools at his disposal. He looked at her clinically because any other way would bother him and he'd be out the room and he couldn't do it. He didn't touch her that way, though; didn't treat her clinically. His vast experience helped him with that. He knew exactly what he was doing. He stepped in and took control.

He got her pants right off, out of the way, because their still being on her would bother him until he took care of it. He lifted her legs up into the air—she was surprised at that, but didn't try to resist him, just let him manipulate her freely—and pulled her jeans off, careful not to do it too forcefully to avoid ripping more holes in them, and then tossed them to the floor without a thought, then slipped off her panties too, but faster, effortlessly. She hadn't even pulled those down before, she'd just pushed aside the faded pink cloth crotch to touch herself. Meanwhile he said, "If I'm gonna fuck you I'd want your pants off, Cass." He didn't say, _You're a lazy drunk and a bad lover_. She was pretty hot right then, though, so it was easy not to say.

She heard the extra act in his voice, the added tone of disapproval. He was being dramatic for her; He didn't really care that much about her not taking her pants all the way off. She liked it. She giggled, drunk and happy and horny. _I'm getting what I want_, she thought, watching him intently and struggling to breathe.

"Thought you might finish me off with that," Cass said.

He didn't know what she meant. Maybe she meant his completely soft cock? He checked it—_Yeah, still completely soft_, he thought upon confirmation. Cass saw him checking and thought he'd just felt the need to stroke himself at the sight of her, and she got even more turned on. Or, Titus was trying to guess, did she mean choking her, with her clothing? Or what? Maybe tie her bra around her neck? Titus said "That's the idea, baby" agreeably anyway. He knew she liked his voice, so he spoke.

He leaned over her and kissed her face and her lips and just made out with her for a little while, sort of gently but firmly, enjoying her and adjusting exactly the way he did everything as he went, fitting her rhythms, finding out where she was at and what kind of intensity worked for her—adjusting to her, finding a better fit.

She didn't think he would kiss her. That made it a lot better somehow. Cass watched porn; he didn't kiss her like people in porn did each other. She liked that.

While he did that Cass started touching his nipples, rubbing and squeezing and twisting, softly and occasionally a little hard. He didn't hate it, but it didn't do anything for him. For whatever reason his nipples just weren't sensitive, didn't really function as an erogenous zone for him. He'd told and told Cass that, but she never remembered. Titus liked other people's nipples; he was good with them. He thought maybe that was where Cass and other people's confusion arose: if he paid attention to theirs and was good with them, he must like his touched too.

Then Titus started groping Cass's body, her waist and her hips and her legs and her belly and her tits, then kissing and licking and nibbling and biting around her neck, one of her major weak spots. He didn't have to stay at her neck for long before she was losing it, needing more now badly. She didn't have to say anything; He could feel it.

He didn't take any of his clothes off, or let her take them off of him, or even pull his cock out. He was holding back. Cass didn't see quite where this was coming from but she loved it. It was different. And hot: The thin veneer of his clothing just barely holding back the animal beneath, that wanted to come out, but so far had only in glimpses.

He went around her neck then lower, avoiding her tits for some reason and kissing and licking and nibbling and sucking around her skinny belly. She got louder, responsive and breathing hard and moaning openly.

At one point he pulled his head back a little to say to her, joking, "Skinny bitch." Cass laughed. He laughed. She loved that he was confident enough, comfortable enough in his masculinity or whatever, that he could laugh and have fun during sex with her. He hadn't talked about laughing much with other partners when she and he talked about sex, but she assumed it happened at least sometimes with them. He was funny. A few times Cass and Titus had made sort of a kink out of making each other laugh during sex. Somehow it seemed to make her a lot hornier, too, often made orgasms better if she'd laughed during the buildup.

He started lightly grazing, then, ghosting a few fingers over her pussy, but not touching it much, and going close to but avoiding her clitoris, exposed already; doing whatever he wanted and taking ownership of her. He felt a bit of a power trip there. He felt himself stirring. Sometimes he was really into things like that, power and mind games and domination/submission stuff; Not tonight. He wasn't doing it for himself, and he wasn't going to let himself enjoy it more than he needed to—a denial which somehow made it all hotter—to bring her to one good orgasm. To make it better than masturbation. He'd do whatever he needed to to activate her body more, awaken more feeling in more erogenous zones and nerve endings, turn her on further, deeper, primally, whatever she might think of it consciously.

He took at least half a minute, which felt like almost 40 minutes to her, just to kiss her and touch her and sweeten her up and feel her and find out what she needed. It only later occurred to him that swapping bodily fluids with her wasn't a good idea.

Then he started using his fingers on her, masterfully. She was very grateful. He was spoiling her.

He used his other hand on one of her tits then nipples, making Cass moan all the while, it was kind of incredible, then he held her face with that same hand and moved his mouth lower, from her neck to her tits and seconds after that went kiss by kiss down her heaving chest, and rapidly expanding and contracting belly, and brought his lips and tongue to her pussy. The noises she was making were slightly loud by then with pleasure and arousal and just everything he was doing to her.

At some point she went to touch herself, but he wouldn't let her. A few seconds later she was too overwhelmed by pleasure to even be able to touch herself, throbbing clit and heat and all. He took care of her quite well with one hand, though, while his mouth moved upward momentarily.

He went back up and sucked on her nipples, which she hadn't expected and which felt nothing short of amazing to her, and made her moan loudly, then he dropped to her belly then her thighs, and then he was all over her pussy, both sides of the outer and inner lips, and after some of that her clit. She'd been waiting for him to suck on that. And lick it. And kiss it. All of which he did.

She had to work to hold out longer against him.

The serious business with his hands on her and his fingers in her and his lips and tongue and mouth on her clit began then. Cass got loud.

She started sucking on one of his long fingers at some point; she'd taken one into her mouth from his hand on her face. She wasn't great at sucking cock, but she liked doing it, and she sucked his finger distractingly well, and swirled her tongue around it and acted like the fingertip was the head of his cock. After a distinctly dirty thought or two he slid the finger out slowly past her lips and took it back and smiled up at her from between her legs with her juices making his face shiny—with his tongue sticking out of his mouth, applying pressure around her clit. She was smiling herself, between moaning and panting and making lots of noise, unable to contain it, and occasionally watching him, with his fucking head between her legs, and occasionally only able to lay back and enjoy the feeling of it all, hardly aware she even had vision or any senses other than touch and smell.

"_Oh my god_," she said loudly at some point. It was ecstatic and memorable and honest and raw. It stuck with him for the next day. She said a lot of other things but he didn't remember them.

At that point Titus's sexually conditioned body started to respond to her, but he defused it, mostly by not acknowledging it. He carefully applied himself to her and her body. It was about _her_ pleasure, that's what he wanted. His attention wandered to himself only briefly—he remembered his own body—and he felt himself softening again. He was so focused on her and not interested in his own pleasure it went away; he forgot about his own body, leaving it far behind.

Occasionally his body betrayed his mind some more, though. _I don't want her_, he thought. _Yes you do_, his cock and balls strongly affirmed, seemingly independently of one another, giving him a heavy impulse of "Shove it _in_ her!"

He fingered her mercilessly and curled his fingers inside of her and brought his mouth back up, keeping her on her toes and not sure what he might do next, and kissed her tits and her neck so nicely, and sucked and nibbled on her neck in spots and on her nipples some more, and tweaked her nipples with his fingers, and in all that time never stopped working her pussy with his other hand, then went back down and licked and sucked her clit and kept fingering her—"_Titus_," she moaned at some point. He liked it when she said his name.—and added a second finger into her pussy and curled his fingers up inside of her, and spread a little against her walls—"Titus!" she said, frantic, squirming against him, under him, "Titus! I'm—Baby!"—and he hit her G-spot then hit it again and again, and worked her clit at the same time with his lips and tongue and sucked her clit too—both of them, _both of them_, and she came, hard. An especially loud "Ah!" or two came from deep in her chest at some point, hurting Titus's ears, but he liked it. "Fuck!" she said. She might've screamed a little, coming, gasping, moaning, gushing cum onto him, his fingers and tongue and lips. From his perspective, knowing her, it looked like a pretty good orgasm.

Cass lost her sense of space and melted into him, spasming and trembling and quivering and tensing and untensing, riding the intense throbbing waves of her orgasm out with him. He held her.

As usual, Cass was out for the night after that, one and done.

Titus picked up her clothes and put most of them by the bed, then put her bra and panties back on her, hooking the bra properly and sliding her panties up her legs and making sure they didn't fold and everything. He recalled taking her clothes off loads of times, but couldn't remember putting any back on her. As he did it she was very pliable, panting but cooling down, trembling uncontrollably a few times, in the best way, enjoying life, feeling very good, sort of insensate and coming down from a relentless long orgasm, odd for how quickly Titus had brought it upon her.

She couldn't move much, but still helped him put her underwear back on her. She didn't normally sleep naked. She would've gladly helped him do more, of whatever he wanted.

It was quick but _really_ good for Cass, and his pacing was perfect. He'd gotten in sync with her just right. She didn't even have to tell him to slow down, or not to stop when he hit the right spots, or to go faster. He'd done all that on his own. He knew. He remembered. It felt like much longer than two minutes to her, and yet like much less than two minutes too, like just a few seconds. It went by too quickly.

For just a moment Titus's body betrayed him strongly again. It nearly won out. He got a very strong urge to stand triumphant over Cass's naked body, still shaking with her orgasm's aftershocks, and rub one out of himself, then watch his cum spurt forcefully across her tits and belly, or on her pussy or in her mouth, and imagine sperm in the millions waggling around and dying on her tongue, in a thick sea of her saliva and his semen, and traces of them on her lips and deep down her throat. He might've been able to come in less than 20 minutes, maybe less than 15.

He was able to pull his mind out of totally aroused mode, and his semi-erect cock re-softened. He just held Cass. Knowing well the kind of endurance he had helped him not be swayed; knowing that it would genuinely take him forever to come. They'd both get bored waiting for it. Cass had hardly touched him, and his cock had got no attention. Because he fucked so much, too much, his body had developed stamina and staying power and tolerance to stimulation, pleasure or pain alike, of his own or other people's on him.

And it would be several different kinds of fucked up if he really did it, jerked off after this, whatever kind of cumplay or lack of it they engaged in, even if it actually felt good, even if he could let himself get all the way hard with her.

He still wasn't hard, not even after watching and feeling and smelling and tasting her come, all of which had been nice. His cock never got more than halfway erect. He'd feel awful afterward too, or maybe even as soon as during his orgasm.

High on life now as well as sloppy drunk and very satisfied, Cass asked, "Are you gonna sleep with me, Titus?" She expected him to.

She didn't even know if he was aroused—that he wasn't—or that he hadn't got any stimulation himself, except technically when she touched his nipples a little. Things like this happened to her sometimes, he knew. For that matter, he might've just got off and she still wouldn't have known, probably wouldn't have cared. He could've just unloaded into her pussy after an hour of sex in multiple positions, not just a few minutes of fingering and oral only on her. She'd got hers, now she was out.

"Sure," he said to her and didn't.

He picked her up again, bodily—easy for him—and pulled the warm bed's sheets down with one hand, set her in the bed and tucked her in. There were some wet spots on the bed. He kissed her goodnight, on the cheek.

He put her rattan shitkicker hat on the nightstand beside her. He took her whiskey bottle; There were other alcoholic drinks in the room but it was taking the one she brought with her that mattered.

Then he went to the bathroom, leaving the guest bedroom door most of the way closed and only one small lamp on in the room because other people would sleep in there, and washed his hands and face and brushed his teeth and used mouthwash for a minute.

Then he went back into the rec room, feeling weird and embarrassed but knowing he'd taken good care of Cass. She'd get a good night's sleep. She'd think he was with her. She might even remember it that way.

They all stared at him, even the robot and the dog.

"That quick, dearie?" Lily said. Raúl laughed. Arcade raised an eyebrow. Olivia didn't look pleased or amused.

Titus knew what she meant. He said, "I just fingered her. Like I said." He gestured at himself. "If I fucked her I'd still be hard—" he said, and Lily gasped at the use of the f-word. "—even if I got off," he finished.

He wasn't hard. He walked close to the group of them. He didn't look aroused or flushed. There wasn't even the smell of sex on him—not that anyone but the dog could smell, and even Rex could barely smell it. Rex nodded at Titus with gregarious manly approval, then lay back down on his pad and gnawed at a chewtoy.

"Really? You'd _still_ be hard?" Olivia said, intrigued, but thinking he was just joking. "You didn't . . . _go_, did you?" She wasn't okay with his fingering Cass—a mutual friend, if a slutty one—who'd clearly got off from it, but if he'd come too it would be much worse.

"No, I didn't get off. She hardly touched me. And yeah, really, I'd still be hard," Titus said. "_Occasionally_ I have some recoil, but I usually don't. I didn't even get cocked for this. Maybe it's cuz I'm young, or in good shape. Or genes. I don't know. Is it cool that I'd still be hard? Or, like, dumb?" Nobody answered his question. No one seemed to hear it.

Olivia giggled self-consciously at the use of what for her were firearms terms, recoil and cocked, for something dirty, amused and uncomfortable, and otherwise feeling a little weird and jealous. She'd heard Cass _coming_. It had been graphic. She wasn't sure if she'd ever actually heard, in person, another person having an orgasm whom she wasn't having sex with herself, and she didn't think she'd ever heard another woman come before. Maybe, but she didn't really remember. It was when she was very young. She'd talked about sex lots with friends, but that was all. She'd kind of liked hearing Cass, in addition to many other related conflicting feelings.

People often talked about sex or vaguely alluded to it but she never saw anyone else doing it, the dirty, the beast with two backs; not that she could remember anyway. Except for a couple of pornography holovids she'd seen brief clips of—sometimes just a few seconds and sometimes a few minutes, clearly not the whole of whatever the people did together.

The porn was apparently made in New Reno, Nevada, a city from before the war a couple counties north and west away from Vegas—they were something like 400 miles apart—but in the same state, the weird square distended downward of Nevada.

Olivia had heard New Reno called "little Vegas" or "the littlest big town in the world" or something. It was a place even more sinful and wealthy in vice than Las Vegas, run by gangsters and crime families, and it had a bunch of casinos and even these porn movie studios, not just a few prostitutes and a measly four working casinos like Vegas. That's what she heard, anyway. Some people said the inhalant drug jet had been invented there; Olivia didn't like it, had only ever used it in combat and didn't know what it was made of. Reno was also part of the Big Circle, brahmin traders; or maybe it was just traders generally. It was kind of a square anyway. (New) Vegas had only been running for a few years, though, 10 or less if she remembered right, and while House said he had defended Vegas, or the Strip anyway, from a lot of nuclear missiles using laser cannons he had on the roof of the Lucky 38, Reno hadn't even been shot at in the war. It'd gone through looting and chaos like anyplace else, but was never a ghost town.

Apparently before the Great War there had been these business-companies called movie studios that made movies. She'd seen a few movies but didn't remember any of them well. She seemed to remember a lion in a film strip, text over mountains, and stupid smokeless explosions of gasoline, going off around motorcycles, that didn't look anything like real explosives.

There was talk that some people in the Gomorrah were gearing up to make porn in Vegas, too. Olivia kind of wanted to watch it get made, or see it when it came out anyway.

She didn't know what it would be like. She had to assume that it didn't always look weird and fake, unreal, for pretend, and that the cameras, however those worked, weren't only ever interested in seeing close-up penetration of things, usually vaginas or assholes, usually by weird-looking guys' big crooked penises, through lenses wide enough to distort anything put close to them, which made things look even more unreal. The cameras always got really close. It was also all about the guys' getting off, which might've been worse than the wide lenses and bizarre focus on abstract penetration. For the first minute or two, a working pre-war TV screen full of a mostly erect cock, pushing in and out of a mostly dry vagina, had been shocking and a little hot to her, but then it became boring, just contextless and disembodied random anatomy, disconnected, objectified somehow and removed from the whole people they were only small parts of.

Well, maybe not that small, but not big like a torso or an arm or leg. She didn't want to see any penis _that_ big. She wouldn't be able to do anything fun with it, wouldn't be able to get it in her _or_ her mouth, certainly not her ass, probably not even between her tits. Maybe she could kinda jerk it off with her hands. Or use it like a pole? She seemed to recall these dancing pole things for strippers in the Gomorrah. She never watched the dancers when she went there, though, so she didn't really know what you did with them; maybe "stripper pole" or "poll" was just a euphemism for some sex machine. But maybe a cock that big could fit between her legs? Probably. She didn't even want to know. Anything that big was just absurd. In between the legs themselves, the thighs, not meaning euphemistically for in her pussy. Maybe with artificial lubrication. Or spit. She'd never tried that before, or seen it or even heard anyone talk about it. Suddenly she wanted to try the between-the-thighs thing with Titus. It sounded kinda hot. She thought she'd like it, at least with him. It might feel nice. Titus's cock was nice and big, but not impossible-to-accommodate big, not four feet long. He wouldn't have to break her pussy to fuck it.

Seeing disembodied sex organs bumping just didn't do it for her. Even if the dicks or the tits or asses were big. People in love and enjoying sex was what turned her on. Or maybe sometimes just them enjoying it and each other for pleasure's sake, not in love or caring about each other's feelings—but definitely not only their bits bumping. People in porn didn't seem to enjoy the sex.

She wondered, not knowing, what happened to super mutants' genitalia after they were dipped in FEV, when they mutated. It _all_ had to get bigger, right? And presumably turn green. The parts of their bodies super mutants didn't clothe became some shade of green, and their bodies 8–10 feet tall; though they all hunched, so they never seemed their full height. Maybe their genitals shrunk, or just fell off, to make them more efficient or something. She knew Titus's cock was going to be more than she was used to, anyway.

Titus knew people at the Gomorrah; she needed to ask him what he'd heard about porn production there. Where would they get cameras? They'd need film too, right? What about lights? Editing machines? Would they try to make up the lame stories people endlessly made fun of porn for having? Would it be parodies? Olivia'd never even seen a porn-with-plot movie before. They sounded cheesy and awful. Maybe they were better, though, if they had some erotica, not just porn. She hadn't seen the whole length of a porn-without-plot movie either. Maybe Titus had some. He was a guy. They must have some at the Gomorrah, right? Because sex? She should ask.

So . . . now Olivia had heard Cass come, in real life. It'd sounded like a good quality orgasm, too. Olivia was proud of Titus. Well, sort of. She almost wished she'd watched. She wanted to see Titus work. And just watch his body move. And see the effects he had on Cass, how he touched her and made her feel.

Cass, Olivia was confident, didn't care enough to perform for others, and when she was that drunk she especially wouldn't care.

Olivia wanted to see Titus's cock; dick; penis-whatever; He said he'd been exposed to a lot of radiation but she was pretty sure he only had one of them. Then she wanted to watch it harden and fill with blood and grow rigid, and maybe help it along the way, too.

"Anyway I'm really sorry about that, guys," Titus was saying. "I went to talk to her. And apologize. She was crying. Which you heard some of. I held her. When she stopped crying she—tried to take advantage of me," he said, pausing awkwardly. "It was just wrong. But, I wasn't sure what else I could do, and I knew it would help, so . . . I fingered her. I'm sorry. I kinda went down on her too, a little. I knew it would bring her relief, and she wouldn't have to feel alone, and she'd go to sleep after. I know people get . . . weird about sex. I've been around it my whole life. Usually in a bad way. Sometimes it doesn't mean much, emotionally. And that certainly didn't."

Olivia slept with Titus (not sex) that night. They locked the door to their room so Cass wouldn't stumble in at 4 am again.

Titus dreaded the inevitable awkward conversation about his just fingering and using his mouth on Cass, but he wasn't going to put it off or try to avoid it. But it didn't really happen. Olivia seemed to understand. Which made Titus nervous. He thought she was just trying to trap him into saying . . . whatever, so then she could tell him to "go sleep with Cass in the guest room if he fucking wanted to," or on the couch in their master bedroom; anything, anywhere rather than with her.

Olivia had a fairly no-nonsense, cool attitude about it, though. When he asked she said, "This is _our_ room. Yours and mine," with a tone like "which hasn't changed." She also said, "And I never wanna sleep alone again. Without you. With anyone but you."

By then Titus was too tired for his normal distrustful paranoid thoughts, such as "Oh, so she doesn't care cuz she just doesn't want to sleep alone." or "She's definitely fucking other guys." And he trusted Olivia. She seemed to be telling him the truth, and not holding anything back.

Olivia still felt a little weird about him and Cass, she told him, over the course of a long discussion of all of it . . . _after_ he'd recounted everything he'd just done to Cass, and what little she'd done to him, in detail at Olivia's insistence.

He said, "You're the only person I want to be with," and though they kept talking for at least an hour, that told her everything she needed or wanted to know. They still stayed up together, only wearing underwear, late into the night talking, giggling, gossiping and cuddling and snuggling together.


	3. I

**I**

_Arrivée — Rifles — Followers — Lingerie — Open Carry — Moving House — Fuel — UH-60M — Handloader — Intimacy — Companion — Destinations — Ammo Types — Wasteland — MultiCam — Butt Dimples — Ploy — Bother — Varmint Rifles — Gear — Door Gun_

The Lucky 38 was the tallest hotel and casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, visible miles away. Titus had landed on its roof. He stepped out of the elevator into the Lucky 38's presidential suite. Like the rest of the hotel-casino it was dark and dusty, and felt kind of haunted to him.

The suite had been his alone but was mostly Olivia's now and she'd moved her followers into it, in addition to buying more storage containers and wardrobes, and weapons trunks which looked disconcertingly familiar to Titus, and another refrigerator and a liquor cabinet and other things. Titus had added a little himself, too, like consumer product science stations by Med-Tek called My First Laboratory and My First Infirmary, and in the main hall a glowing jukebox loaded with a bunch of vinyl records, 45 RPM singles from before the war. Nothing was playing.

He had it start "Heartache by Numbers" by Bryan Ferry, and queued next "2000 Man" by the Rolling Stones, "Human Touch" by Rick Springfield though he wasn't sure why and felt dumb for it later, "Sorrow Tears and Blood" by Fela Kuti and Afrika 70 and "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)" by The Four Tops.

The thin door to the master bedroom was closed.

ED-E was hovering in sleep mode outside the room. ED-E was from the east coast of the United States, a multipurpose robot made by the Enclave; which had been the remains of the lawful evil pre-war US government, when they were still around; its name an initialism for Eyeframe Durabot subject E; also, conveniently, of the many marks and scores and keepsakes it'd collected on its long journey southwest, one was a metal Illinois license plate whose clearest characters were "ED-E." The full plate number might've been 2ED-E59. ED-E had a lot of noodly metal appendages sticking out of it. It was a Sputnik 1-looking floating basketball radio antenna robot thing.

Arcade Gannon had fallen asleep reading a magazine in the suite's main hall area.

Titus heard voices coming from the guest room.

He deduced which pegs were his rifle's on one of the big metal pegboards, which he'd set up by hand with Olivia by the elevator doors for the weapons they used most. Maybe they should've labeled them. Each pegboard had storage bins under for ammunition, magazines they emptied so their springs wouldn't wear out, and gun oil and cleaning kits and stuff. Sometimes carrying around guns was fun but sometimes it was just tedious.

Titus's rifle had an incredibly long accurate range, more than a mile. He'd made kills at ranges longer than a mile, on targets human and monstrous. Past a few hundred yards it required technical skills even to make a hit. His rifle was also small, as sniper rifles went, about the size of a Colt M4 carbine with its buttstock extended; It was in bullpup configuration, with magazine and action behind pistol grip and trigger group, reducing overall length without sacrificing barrel length; It had a 26" barrel. It'd been his primary weapon lately, colored in black and flat dark earth: a gnarly-looking bolt action Desert Tactical Arms Stealth Recon Scout Advancement 1 (SRS-A1), in the powerful .338-inch Lapua Magnum, a dual purpose anti-personnel and anti-matérial cartridge for long-range military sniper rifles proven in war in the Middle East long before the Resource Wars.

Olivia was very jealous of Titus's SRS. He had several and would've just given her one, but she wanted to find her own to earn it. Titus was fairly certain she'd never find one anywhere. To find his, he'd had to go to Salt Lake City, Utah, with a very specific destination, then he'd had to rehabilitate most of the manufacturing area's machines, and make the rifles on his own from pre-war schematics and design documents and various materials, some of them proprietary, like the California-based Gun Runners did. It took him testing and a few tries to get it right. The SRS weighed 10 pounds unloaded and was almost as effective against deathclaws, people in heavy or powered armor and super mutants as Olivia's huge French PGM Précision Ultima Ratio Hécate 2, a .50 Browning Machine Gun (BMG) bolt action anti-matérial rifle that weighed 34 pounds unloaded—a steel and aircraft-grade alloy metal skeleton monster. Its name was written with a number, but text on the right side of the weapon said "HECATE II." Titus had a bunch of Hécate 2s, and other so-called light fifties, and used to use them, but thought of the Hécate 2 as her rifle now. Olivia could kill a deathclaw with her rifle in one shot at long range. So could Titus with his, but it and its ammo weighed much less and were cheaper and thus more efficient, and his round had a flatter trajectory. Technically Olivia's rifle had a longer range than his, but she'd never shot at anything from further away than about 200 yards (there were 1,760 yards in a mile), a close range to him. In an end results sense the main difference between Olivia's rifle and Titus's was that Olivia's made her victims' gore explosions bigger, which she loved but which he was past caring about. Olivia had been lifting weights for the last few weeks, but she'd still usually get sick of the Hécate 2's weight, especially if they were going up a hill, and Titus would end up carrying it for her.

Titus set his rifle in its spot.

He loved that he had the kind of closeness with anyone that he had with Olivia; that they'd share ammo, and stored a lot of their weapons and gear together, and talked a lot and were actual friends. He didn't even mind carrying her heavy god damn rifle. They'd never kissed romantically or made out or had any form of sex, but they were close enough that sometimes they slept together in the presidential suite's huge bed, or out in the wasteland in sleeping bags, not only for warmth. They kissed each other on the cheeks a lot. Olivia was very pretty, as was Titus very handsome, and they were both in good shape. Resisting sex was difficult sometimes and neither of them were sure why they did it, except that they were close and it was going well and they didn't want to screw it up.

As usual, Titus had come over-prepared; after the extremely high quality sniper rifle, he had another rifle, two pistols (one on his leg that he forgot about, one on his armored vest), knives, grenades and gear.

His tricked out ultramodern rifle, a Heckler and Koch HK417A2 with a 13" barrel, had a shotgun attached to it under the barrel via one of the rifle's four Picatinny accessory rails, named for Picatinny Arsenal of New Jersey which tested and evaluated the rail, and from whose testing came its US military designation, Military Standard 1913 (Assault Rifle)—"MIL-STD-1913 (AR)." The HK417 was a battle rifle, chambered in the full-power 7.62x51mm NATO/.308 Winchester cartridge, which was also designed to work in semi-automatic or 600 RPM fully-automatic fire modes, unlike Titus's other frequent recent companion, a Springfield Armory M14 Enhanced Battle Rifle (EBR), a modernized kit for its older brother the plain M14, which wasn't designed for fully-automatic fire. Whereas the HK417, Titus had found through exhaustive experimentation and noodling and experience, was, and handled it well. The HK417 was a scaled-up version of its little brother the HK416, an assault rifle in 5.56x45mm NATO/.223 Remington, based on the AR-15 platform and designed as a replacement for and improvement to the Colt M4/M4A1 for the US military. The attached shotgun was a C-More Systems Model 26 Modular Accessory Shotgun System, a US military adoption, the M26 MASS. It was meant for breaching doors and increasing short-range lethality, like versus people on the other sides of doors, and it worked well against Powder Gangers' faces. Yes, _very_ over-prepared.

Titus removed the HK417's magazine then pulled its charging handle a couple times and looked in the empty chamber to make sure he didn't have a round chambered (he didn't), then slid its magazine back in, made sure the red and white pictograph fire selector was set to safe (it was), closed the ejection port's dust cover, cleared the M26 attached to it as well, and finally racked his fancy, optimized battle rifle.

He took off his armored utility vest, an Eagle Industries Multi-Mission Armor Carrier (MMAC) patterned in MultiCam, and set it by the same pegboard his rifles were on. It had been issued to some US military units in war in the early 21st century between the government's developing other things, long before powered exoskeletons were in common use and then power armor and microfusion happened. If Titus hugged everybody like he usually did with the vest on it would feel weird, if he could feel it at all through the Kevlar and canvas and nylon, and the ceramic trauma plate in the vest's front plate pocket. He also took off the top blouse of the Army Combat Uniform (ACU) he was wearing, revealing the soft black tank top he'd forgot he wore underneath, and his torso chilled for a second. The Lucky 38 tended to be chilly. Like there were ghosts around.

He was so used to carrying multiple weapons that he entirely forgot about his sidearm, and its separate pistol belt, strapped to his thigh in a drop-down tactical holster, sometimes called a drop-leg holster, a coyote tan Cordura nylon Blackhawk Omega VI Ultra—a little excessive, maybe—the pistol a Glock 22C, and a few knives, which he also would've removed if he'd thought to; It was just good manners.

Titus found the tipsy Rose of Sharon Cassidy, Raúl the ghoul Tejada, Lillian Bowen the hulking blue nightkin super mutant, and Rex the Mark III Cyberhound, Law Enforcement Officer (LEO) Support Model in the presidential suite's guest room, all the humanoids sitting at the table, clearly playing strip poker. Lily was winning.

Titus went around the table and greeted everyone with familiarity. He made Rex wait patiently until last and calm down because, early on, the robo-German Shepherd got excited and started jumping on him; finally knocking Rex over playfully and giving him a nice belly rub; The dog loved it and the attention.

"You're always wearing something different," Cass said, just before hugging him and kissing him on the cheek. He wasn't sure quite what she meant by what she said. She was unreservedly staring at him. She liked his arms. And his chest. And the rest of his body. She'd adjusted her bra when she saw him come in; Her top half was down to a beat-up white bra, but she still had her pants on. He could see the edge of her panties under them. She had two pairs of panties; On her were the high-cut briefs, pale pink with the color washed out, unflattering even to someone with good skin.

Nobody seemed aroused, which was probably a good thing, however disappointing; no one ever seemed to be passionate about anything.

"That's kinda been my style lately," Titus said to Cass before thug-hugging Raúl, whose Petró-Chico jumpsuit was puddled on the floor. As ever Raúl's body was hot. His radiation-scorched skin looked flaky and awful and ruined if not uniform. Under the jumpsuit he wore a ratty plain white T-shirt and equally ratty green briefs. Olivia had said Titus was the one person Raúl liked enough not to be painfully snarky, sardonic and sarcastic about, though Raúl called Olivia boss.

Raúl's large N-frame Smith &amp; Wesson Model 29 revolver—famous for being the primary weapon of Dirty Harold, the main character of the same-named film series—was out on the table for some reason. It had a 6" barrel; Empty it weighed 3 pounds. Titus picked up Raúl's revolver and opened and checked its cylinder, which had a .44 Remington Magnum round loaded in every chamber. That was unsafe, especially around alcohol and Cass. "Dammit, Raúl," Titus said as he unloaded it. Raúl looked away at the floor.

"Hello, dearie," Lily said when Titus got to her, hugging him a little too hard and picking him up off the floor by a few inches.

After the greetings Cass said to Titus, "Want a drank?"

Titus, not looking at her tits, said, "Sure."

Cass said, "Stop lookin' at my tits."

"Sorry," Titus said.

One liquored-up snort of good-humored but sour laughter later, Cass pulled the chair beside her out from under the table and said, "Get yourself a drink, honey, I'll deal you in."

Titus nodded and started to sit as Raúl said, "The boss is in there reloading," gesturing back toward the suite's master bedroom. English wasn't Raúl's first language, though he'd become fluent in it somehow. He had a Mexican Spanish accent. English hadn't been Titus's first language either, which you could hear in his voice sometimes though where it'd come from was hard to place—not México, not the USA, not Canada; most people's knowledge of pre-war political boundaries ended there. Maybe Europe.

Olivia wasn't Titus's boss, and what Raúl said meant a couple of other things too; The door was closed, so she was not to be disturbed by anyone but himself, and in all likelihood she'd be in there only wearing underwear . . . possibly exciting underwear.

"I better go let her know I'm here," Titus said. "I brought some stuff over." He stood. He leaned down to hug Cass again, one-armed, and she hugged him back with a wink, then without thinking he took a swig of her Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey. It burned down his throat.

Lily asked for a hug too, so Titus hugged her again before leaving the room.

Despite what he said he ran around in the main hall and played fetch with Rex for a few minutes—the dog didn't get enough exercise—before getting him a bowl of water in the kitchen, and then he awoke ED-E and checked in with it (Titus didn't like to impose gender) for long enough to run a couple diagnostics, ones Olivia didn't go through with it often enough.

Arcade didn't wake up the whole time.

Titus went into Olivia's room—her and his room, really—and cracked the door open, not looking in though he wasn't sure why; she wouldn't have cared if he had, maybe wanted him to look at her; and knocked on the door so she'd hear him and said, "Hey Olivia."

"_Titus_!" she said, instantly recognizing him by his voice and springing to her feet and almost falling. She was at her custom-made stainless steel reloading and gunsmithing bench, one he'd helped her install along the room's right wall, needing to push aside some wardrobes, and she'd been sitting on a very comfortable upholstered wood chair they brought in from the suite's hall. She had a book lying open on the bench, one from the little metal frame bookshelf they set up next to the bench for books on reloading, guns and ammo.

Olivia was in her twenties. So was Titus. She wasn't sure when she was born exactly, out in the country further north and east. He knew when he was born but didn't like telling people. Sometimes they thought she was older. Sometimes they thought he was.

She ran to him smiling. Her long black hair bounced wildly around her head and face and looked kind of ratty. Maybe she hadn't showered.

Also smiling, Titus ran to her. They didn't run at full speed, but they ran.

This part had once been a challenge for him, especially if he was feeling sensual or at all aroused. She was wearing only a black lace bra with big cups and matching boyshorts, a pair of underwear in very good condition. She'd known he was coming. Olivia had one of Titus's few weaknesses: large breasts. Not huge or absurd ones or gag boobs, just large ones. Wearing a high quality but nonetheless skimpy bra, Olivia rendered their bouncing, as she ran, terribly visual. This scenario had played out so many times it was easy for Titus not to stare; He hardly noticed them anymore, and didn't this time despite their exuberance. It wasn't Olivia's body he was most interested in; he tried not to notice it because it was distracting. She walked around the wasteland almost as much as he did, though he ran a lot more, and she exercised like him, and she had a fit, shapely body unusual in wastelanders, and a figure so curvy and lovely it almost made him angry. Her shoulders were built up a little now.

As far as Titus knew she'd grown up a wastelander, maybe a tribal, though in the last few months she'd become sort of a city girl. Oftentimes they'd eat in, drawing from food stores they had in the suite, or go out for dinner at some restaurant, rather than hunting, killing and cooking all their own meals. She wasn't completely converted but she'd ceased to be a hunter-gatherer.

He suspected that her often wearing naught but underwear like this was between a third and a half for him, but maybe because of his self-esteem wouldn't quite allow himself to acknowledge that. They'd never talked about it and, as far as he knew, she actually did like loading bullets wearing only underwear. Titus didn't judge. If he had a frequent opportunity to show off his well-toned body to her, he would've taken it too. But he was usually always doing something different in some different place, and he normally came over to her place and she hardly ever came to his, whereas Olivia reloaded in this same place a lot, more than she practiced shooting. Titus shot more than she did, which seemed odd to him because she was a gun nut, and he only used weapons out of practical necessity; most of his life, it seemed, had been spent in the sad wasteland that remained of the United States of America, plus a few years elsewhere, and guns were much more common there than explosives or laser and plasma weapons. Olivia loved guns; Titus knew a lot about them. It was one of the things they'd initially bonded over. He also exercised more than her, and regularly, and was more social.

Titus was very tall, probably unhealthily lean but _ripped_, and, whenever she felt him—as often as possible—he was unsettlingly hard-bodied, even his abs. Unsettlingly in a good way. Sometimes he looked like a wastelander to her, and more often military, but not normal military; like special operations. He exercised. His physique was incredible.

She didn't have a thing for military or even uniforms, but she'd wanted to fuck him since she first saw him, even before they actually met. Sometimes when he entered a room she'd just watch him. (Most people did.) He always smelled nice, too, even when sweaty from exercise or a firefight; Smell was important to Olivia. He didn't sound quite like anyone else, either, in a way she couldn't put a finger on, and she'd been all around the western half of the USA. He was probably the most attractive man she'd ever seen, crowd-gathering attractive, and somehow interested in her. He was perceptive; He also had a keen awareness of her feelings, which she hadn't really encountered before. He gave her all the space she needed, and usually much more than she wanted.

This morning, she assumed, he'd finished running some absurd long distance and then showered self-consciously. She didn't shower every day.

Titus and Olivia met softly despite running and hugged then backed off and kissed each other on the cheek and hugged again, warmly and for longer than they needed to.

That was their greeting ritual. Olivia's breath smelled bad. Once the niceties had been observed, then Olivia could indulge in her own greeting ritual:

"What're you carrying?" she asked him, meaning guns, eyes sliding down his body, to the sidearm he'd just now remembered on his thigh . . . and maybe enjoying his body a little, too. Accidentally mimicking her movement brought Titus's eyes to her wealth of cleavage. Fortunately Olivia was on-topic, and before he had a chance to stare, or even answer her previous question, she'd already appended, "—Glock 17? 18?"

"22C," he said, C for Compensated. Not her cup size, which was bigger. "You were close." He popped the holster's thumbstrap and unholstered it to show her, keeping the muzzle pointed well away from both of them and slipping the magazine out of the pistol grip. There wasn't a round in the chamber. He handed the pistol to her but not the loaded mag. It was a fourth generation Glock, with finger grooves on the grip's rough-textured frame, some parts made of metal and the rest a nylon-based polymer. People used to derisively call Glocks plastic guns, before their marketing became so successful and they so popular that people started liking it. It made guns much lighter.

"That's . . . .45 ACP?" she asked, enjoying it, feeling its weight in one hand then the other—it weighed 1.6 pounds empty—pulling the slide and apparently not reading the ".40" printed on the left side of it. Also on it were the stylized-G Glock logo and "22Gen4" and "AUSTRIA."

"Forty S&amp;W," he said: .40 Smith &amp; Wesson, a pistol cartridge born of the 10mm Auto.

Titus was, even before he'd landed atop the Lucky 38, sick of talking with Olivia about guns, and too polite to say so. Whatever else she was, she wasn't single-mindedly obsessive, so answering what she asked didn't only encourage her to ask more; He'd tried that before; He knew her better than that. She'd fixate on a select set of questions and just ask them, basically as a salutation, like the way dogs sniffed each other, and though he didn't like it, then she'd be done, and nothing Titus did would keep her from asking.

So he tried to address her questions: He began with, "I brought a bunch'a stuff, like normal. Do you wanna go look at them on the rack?" She self-consciously giggled at "rack." He smiled. Then he spontaneously added, forgetting what else he meant to say, "That way I can stand next to you while you admire them and slyly put my arm around your ass and male-gaze at you."

She laughed. She had a really nice laugh.

She knew Titus wouldn't really do or particularly want to do anything he'd just said. She wished he'd been serious, that he would touch her, and check out her body and make her feel sexy. She didn't say that directly. Instead she unironically said "Okay," her eyes encouraging something dirty, fully granting him permission, and put her arm around his shoulders—broad, iron-firm, strong tall ones, all but naked in the tank top, and warm—and started turning him toward the suite's main hall.

They were daring one another and bluffing; something about the way people usually acted, complacent and subdued, insouciant. Olivia didn't really want to and wasn't about to walk around wearing only underwear where her followers might see her. That was why she closed the door. Normally confident, Olivia got more and more uncomfortable as she got closer to nakedness. Olivia knew Titus wouldn't be affected if he were in her position, only wearing underclothes; he was relatively comfortable with his body, which was also much nicer than hers. She considered daring him to strip too but didn't, mostly fearing rejection. If he offered to she'd jump on it though.

This whole thing of Olivia in her knickers and bra was something special, just for him. He loved it, yet didn't allow himself to enjoy it. He wasn't sure why. He liked that he was close enough with someone to have something special, even if it was ludicrous and oddly tame. He was afraid he didn't have a good enough equivalent, something just for her. When they slept together he usually stripped down to his boxers and no shirt. He knew Olivia liked that, and his tan, all over his body, from being out in the desert so much and taking about a half hour to sunbathe naked on most days.

His most significant thing just for her was that while he wouldn't normally even have considered sharing his arsenal, with anybody, he'd shared it with her. He'd never really lived with anyone before, either, and now he lived with Olivia. He slept with her (not sex) in this—their—room in the Lucky 38 now more than he slept anywhere with anyone else. He'd even showed her his main storage warehouse once or twice—where he'd never brought anyone before; much less had he trusted anyone in the area, except for nonhumans: some of his big stray dog pack, those two cats who stayed with him, and ED-E, whom he'd rescued from obscurity and deactivation in a dark building in Primm, Nevada, some months ago, before discovering the underground military complex from before the Great War that was his base of operations now. He'd moved his whole arsenal there since. He wasn't sure if Olivia had ever been to the new arsenal; They'd have to remedy that. Soon.

Titus put his shapely arm around Olivia's shapely waist, but not her shapely rear end, and even let himself feel her mostly naked body's warmth and smooth skin for a half-second before saying, "Actually, keep reloading for a bit. I meant to say I brought some stuff over with me like we talked about before, but I wanted to make sure that's still okay with you. Before I brought it all down here," and then removing his arm from her.

"I want you to move your stuff in," Olivia said, putting a hand out flat high on his chest.

"Are you sure you want me to . . . be around that much?" he said, successfully not flinching at her touch. He had no trouble with any form of sex, but intimacy was often different. "I don't want you to get sick of me," he said. "I don't want you to feel any less free."

Her heart surged, eyes widened, and, her lips and eyes smiling hugely, Olivia hugged him hard, wrapping her arms around his neck. She put her head on his neck and shoulder and just held him. Then she looked up and said, "I won't get sick of you. Don't be silly."

She smiled. He'd been right; she'd been serious about it all. Moving some of his stuff into what he thought of as her place felt like a very big step to him, a new level of intimacy, which considering his promiscuous sexual history was strange, but that's still how he felt.

"What'd you bring?" she asked.

"Some clothes, ammo and magazines, a couple weapons and cleaning kits and tools, a suit, and . . . some gear and armor. It's still upstairs," Titus said.

"Did you say a suit? Like a dress suit?" Olivia said.

"Yeah. It's tailored to me, though, so it doesn't look all shitty and rumpled like the Chairmen's suits do," Titus said and Olivia grinned. The Chairmen were a besuited gang of ex-raiders, who used to call themselves the Boot Riders, from the Las Vegas area who ran the 1950s Rat Pack-style Tops casino on the Strip, as domesticated, dressed and styled by the Strip's president, CEO, proprietor and autocrat Robert Edwin House, often called Mr. House. The Chairmen's official head was Benny, who was dead.

Olivia smiled more with anticipation as she asked, "And you came here in your Helicopter?" Sometimes she said "helicopter" like it was a proper noun.

_One of my helicopters, plural_, Titus didn't say; He had a lot of aircraft.

And now, storage space, too. He was very close with the Boomers; They said there was a prophecy about him, and kept calling him "Captain Walka." They'd given him most of the area of Nellis Air Force Base, about 13 miles from the Strip, northeast in Las Vegas Township between the City of North Las Vegas and the census-designated place Sunrise Manor—most of which the Boomers didn't use; they didn't use a considerable amount of the military installation's 11,300 acres (17.6 miles). Their entire faction and Titus both had plenty of space; he didn't live there, but he kept aircraft and equipment and parts there. There were three main areas, as they were referred to in internal paperwork, of the base; The Boomers used Area III and Area I, and Titus was free to use Area II and most of Area I, namely the airfield and its two 10,000-foot runways, which despite the Boomers' recent acquisition of a Boeing B-29 Superfortress care of Titus they still hardly used at all. He had a lot of hangars of his own. Titus had helicopters, propeller planes and jet planes, unmanned drones and various land vehicles. He didn't have any tanks yet.

Planes, especially not-quite modern ones without vertical take-off and landing like the common VB02 vertibirds had, were safer and more common than helicopters, but had their own limitations, most importantly of space. Bizarrely, there was very little flat space in the Mojave, and planes needed long runways.

He didn't have fuel for all the vehicles.

The United States of America had had the same problem up to the Great War; The entire planet's supply of oil had all but run out. The fight over it was called the Resource Wars, and Titus hadn't read about them much lately. The USA had invaded México in the 2050s, before the wars, to keep oil coming, he remembered. The European Commonwealth declared war on the Middle East. The United Nations collapsed. The Middle East ran out of oil. Nobody won.

Titus couldn't keep it straight anymore, but he knew oil, the New Plague, PVP and FEV were all involved somehow; Also in the 2050s the New Plague had hit the USA, and killed tens of thousands of people. He wasn't sure how it began. The American government hired one of their biggest defense contractors, West Tek, to cure the New Plague. West Tek established a large research facility in southern California. They failed. The facility got nuked during the Great War; It was "The Glow" now. Titus had been there.

Out of fear, the US government eventually took over the research done at the Glow and moved it to a new military base just outside of Mariposa (Spanish for "butterfly"), California, near Yosemite National Park, and the seat of Mariposa County, which some of Yosemite was in. Mariposa was about 290 miles northwest of Los Angeles, and around 400 miles in a straight line west and just a little south of Las Vegas. PVP became FEV there. Both super mutants and the Brotherhood of Steel were born in the Mariposa base.

The USA established a front line in Alaska to protect oil there in the late 2050s. Tensions with Canada rose. China invaded Alaska in the mid-2060s; war began on American soil. In 2072 on some pretext the USA officially annexed the whole of Canada, Titus remembered. After that, China began using biological weapons; the failed West Tek research into curing the New Plague morphed into, to counter biological weapons, the Pan-Immunity Virion Project (PVP)—which also failed, but was the conception of the Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV), which was eventually successful, but not in a good way.

Ionizing radiation emitted during the Great War mutated everything, but the radiation—X-rays, gamma rays—mostly just killed; it was FEV that made things into monsters. Radiation could change a scorpion or a cockroach a little, like make a species' random variation or average size a little bigger, or render them unable to reproduce or properly digest food, but it was FEV that made Emperor scorpions—_Pandinus imperator_—common pets before the war, a gigantic threat to humans, and American cockroaches—_Periplaneta americana_—grow to the size of dogs and able to eat all but a person's bones.

Fuel notwithstanding, maintenance for some of Titus's vehicles was costly, and many required oil for regular maintenance and lubrication. He tended to use the cheap-to-maintain, nuclear-powered helicopters.

His favorite mode of transportation lately had been a UH-60M Black Hawk, a US military adaptation of a Sikorsky S-70, a four-bladed, twin-engine, medium-lift utility helicopter he'd restored with some friends further east. It worked with synthetic oil, fortunately, and was nuclear-powered. It had seen combat before the Great War, and so far served Titus quite well. He'd flown to the Lucky 38 with it this morning. He usually flew with a copilot to be safe, but hadn't this time because he didn't know how long he'd be and hated boring people.

"I did," Titus said.

Olivia always enjoyed it when he came to her by flying vehicle—and liked the idea of him coming to her in general—especially if it had large weapons on it, as the UH-60M did.

Olivia kept hoping to blast some raiders or cazadores or something with one of the 7.62x51mm Dillon Aero M134D-H miniguns, very fast-firing six-barreled heavy machineguns, door guns, mounted in Titus's helicopter, but so far hadn't been so lucky. Really, it was the raiders who were lucky. A weapon like that did more than just kill a person. Titus had been trying to avoid giving Olivia an opportunity to shoot anything with it. Some of that was maneuvering, but Titus believed what really kept Olivia from blazing through a few thousand rounds in a few seconds had been his proviso: that _she_ would have to provide the ammunition, or at least repay him promptly in full for what she used. He kept close track of how much ammo he loaded each of the two miniguns with, even wrote it down and shit. To her chagrin, Olivia knew him well enough to know he wasn't bluffing or exaggerating; She wouldn't get her way with this unconditionally.

She couldn't complain. He didn't charge her for fuel at all, despite being willing to fly her pretty much anywhere she wanted. She could hardly imagine what he had to do to fuel such a beast. Maybe it'd been converted to nuclear power. It could carry thousands of pounds of cargo, was fast, had a range of 1,300 miles, was 64 feet long, was about 8 feet wide, and was almost 17 feet tall. Considering that, Olivia doubted that even the NCR could afford to fuel such a thing, and they were rich. _Mad_ rich.

"Cool," Olivia said. "So, you want me to stay here? While you bring your stuff in?"

"I thought you might want to finish what you're doing," Titus said, gesturing at her reloading bench. "It'll take me a couple minutes. I don't know how much more you wanted to get done."

"Not too much. Couple'a minutes," Olivia said, briefly looking between his eyes and his lips, which Titus noticed but said nothing about.

"That sounds fine," Titus said. "If you're still loading after I move my stuff I'll just go to the gym." Olivia hadn't known about the Lucky 38's second-floor gym and exercise equipment until Titus had told her. Mr. House hadn't mentioned it.

"Okay," Olivia said.

"What were you loading?" Titus asked. He didn't really want to know.

"Reloading, actually," Olivia said. "I haven't recycled empties in like a week. Or more. I was doing some fifty match." She was referring to .50 BMG. She'd been really into using high quality, consistent match-grade ammunition lately, the one she was loading a copy of the 650-grain FMJ pre-war US military cartridge officially called Cartridge, Caliber .50, M1022 Long Range Sniper. She said it reduced her spread.

"Nice," Titus said. He hugged her. He wasn't into loading bullets like her but he knew she loved it. "I'll let you know when I'm done moving my stuff, okay?"

Olivia hugged him back. "Okay," she said, then got a look in her eye and kissed him on the cheek once sweetly, languorously. He really liked her lips. She really liked his too.

He smiled and said "D'aww" quietly then kissed her back on her cheek, putting one of his hands on her smooth warm face. She was beaming at him as he left. Both of them heard loud Spanish curses as Raúl presumably lost a hand. Olivia put some clothes on and talked with Cass about what'd just happened, then went back to loading bullets.

Titus hadn't brought any of his dog pack with him this time but felt like a little companionship; he asked ED-E if it wanted to come with him to the roof, and ED-E happily bleeped that it did. It didn't mind idling, but really liked to be moving, and more than that enjoyed being outside, especially up high where it could see for miles. The phallic bell-ended roulette spinner icon of New Vegas's excess, the Lucky 38, was the highest thing around, short of mountaintops like the peak of Mount Charleston or Black Mountain on the McCullough range, or going up in a helicopter or an airplane. ED-E was happy to go. It hovered happily alongside Titus.

Moving in all the stuff Titus'd brought took a few trips. ED-E offered to packmule for him, but he wanted to do it himself.

Normally Olivia hated being interrupted while loading bullets, but this time she was waiting for him. She was still only wearing underwear, and still barefoot. Titus wasn't sure if such an outfit was good for hand-loading bullets. It inspired certain thoughts.

"You brought your 417," she said after a hug he thought might've been excessive but which he liked. "That's a nice weapon." While he was moving his stuff in she'd thrown on a ragged leather duster from one of her sets of NCR veteran ranger armor closed it and gone out into the hall to check Titus's guns out. "I could tell cuz it's like mine but big," she added, giving him by accident an excellent opportunity to say something very dirty indeed. "Like hers but big" referred mostly to penises but also to her two HK416A5s, stored on their metal pegboard setup, which she hardly ever used because they were just too nice.

"I did, and yes it is." Titus said. "Hello to you too."

She smiled. "Sorry. Hi." She noticed he hadn't made a dick joke and absentmindedly wondered why.

He smiled too.

"Did I forget to tell you what I brought?" Titus said.

"Yeah," Olivia said. It was part of her ritual. He knew that.

"Well I'm sorry too. I'm remiss," Titus said. "I'd have to go through it all to remember everything, but mainly it was the HK417 and the SRS. I put an M26 on the 417 and the LD50." _That's too many numbers_, Titus thought, his head spinning. He wasn't sure how he'd just said it. The last one was a joke.

"Oh, I didn't notice the SRS," Olivia said. "I guess I'm just used to seeing it there." She smiled.

He smiled back.

"I meant to ask you about guns," Olivia said.

"I think you already did," Titus said.

Smiling some more, Olivia said, "No, I meant about for what we're gonna be doing."

"What are we gonna be doing?" Titus said. "Please say oral sex!"

Olivia laughed, getting the reference and raising an eyebrow, really pleased first by his willingness and flexibility, and second by eroticism in general. She tingled. She said, "I dunno what we'd need guns for _that_ for, but . . . let's not take it off the table." Titus laughed. So did she. There was a brief moment of consideration. Maybe it was risky to joke about that; She liked guns a lot, which everyone knew, and was fine with joking about it but she didn't like to mix guns _at all_ with sex, and she was pretty sure Titus knew that. "Um . . . Can we go to Goodsprings, please?" she asked, meaning fly there. She'd been impatient about travel since he started using helicopters more.

"Okay," Titus said.

"See? You're _awesome_. Just like that, we're goin' to Goodsprings. Thanks, honey," Olivia said, smiling and messing up his hair, which she loved doing but only rarely did. He didn't mind. Unlike hers his hair was short and neat, which she liked. He often wore a beard but didn't have one now, just stubble. Sometimes Olivia really liked a beard, but this way she could feel his lips against her much better, and less scratchiness, though she didn't mind that. She thought about kissing him a lot, and at the moment liked him stubbly or clean-shaven.

"You're welcome, pretty lady. Thanks for the compliment," he said.

"Pssht," Olivia said, smiling, "It's nothing, it's true. I wanted to hang out with Sunny." Sunny Smiles was one of her best friends. "I thought I'd go see Doctor Mitchell, too. He doesn't get out enough."

"Yeah," Titus said. "Sure, we can go there. If you don't want me to get in the way of you and Sunny I can talk to Trudy or something."

"No, Sunny likes you," Olivia said. "She just doesn't know you. Or you don't know her. But whatever, we can all hang out. I think Sunny will wanna go clear out some critters. We usually do that when I go there. So I was gonna bring one of my varmint rifles."

Olivia had a collection of those. Lately she'd favored a Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle, a CZ 452 Ultra Lux (more target rifle than varmint, but whatever), a Savage Arms Model 110 or a SAKO Quad Varmint, mostly in 5.56x45mm/.223, or .22 Long Rifle if it wasn't windy.

"Right," Titus said, encouraging her, grateful so far that she hadn't got into what particular brand of hollowpoint bullets or specific gunpowder she'd be using, and if Speer or Federal was better, and if .44 Magnum was too much to use on gophers or whatever.

"But then I wanted to go clear out the area the Fiends have—by that vault, Vault 19 I think," Olivia said. "So we'll be taking on lightly-armored humans."

_I think it's Vault 3_, Titus thought. He was a little more involved in the region's affairs. "That hide stuff most of 'em wear isn't armor," he said. "Not if you use more than .380 ACP anyway." Olivia laughed. He was relaxing. You didn't get to make jokes like that around just anybody. "But some of them wear scrap metal plates and stuff. Occasionally," he went on. "So you can count on them mostly to be unarmed—un_armored_—but some might come up with stuff like that. Or maybe flak jackets and breastplates from NCR soldiers they murdered, or from Gun Runners they caught off guard, or merchants or something."

"I forgot about that," Olivia said. "Raiders are such _dicks_!"

"I know, right!" Titus said.

"Oh, I wanted to go over ammo with you a little," Olivia said. "Is that okay?"

Titus felt odd to be asked that. Unlike her normal gun questions, she was asking his permission for this.

"Yeah, that's fine," he said.

"So . . . what kinda ammo are you bringing for the gas gun?" Olivia said, meaning his HK417, which was gas-operated.

"Match, ball and armor-piercing," Titus said, "ball" being another word for FMJ.

"We might come up against radscorpions," Olivia said. "What should I bring for my fifty?"

"FMJ normal stuff is plenty to pierce giant radscorpions' armor with fifty BMG," Titus said. "You might wanna bring a magazine or so of AP rounds or something. I'm sure you'll bring some match, too."

"What would _you_ use against them?" Olivia said.

"In what caliber, fifty?" Titus said.

"I meant seven-six-two," she said.

"For most of 'em I'd just use FMJ," he said. "Against the really big ones if I could I'd switch to armor-piercing."

Olivia had done much less wasteland wandering and fighting than Titus. He'd done so much wandering he was even good at geographic terrain stuff like walking on rocks up hills and rock climbing, which she didn't see the fun in. As far as fighting wasteland creatures, she'd only come up against the worst of them, deathclaws—gigantic khaki-colored lizard things with long claws and twisty horns that jumped at you and seemed to exist only to eat, kill and destroy—three times so far, and they still scared the hell out of her. They scared her even more than ambush-hunting flying death groups of cazadores—these giant black and orange wasps with red eyes, long stingers and very painful venom. (Apparently before the war cazadores had been these wasps only two inches long, not four or five feet.) The first time she'd come across a deathclaw she hadn't had an anti-matérial rifle; She'd been lucky to survive.

They shifted around in the room, getting on with it.

Titus said, "Hey Olivia? What shoe size are you?"

"Nine," Olivia said.

Titus made a mental note.

Later Titus said, "I'd like to bring ED-E with us, if that's okay," sitting on their bed as Olivia began to put some damn clothes on.

He was wearing MultiCam Arid pre-war US military uniform pants—the top was out in the hall—part of an Army Combat Uniform (ACU); Olivia wanted to match, but only had the normal temperate forest-type MultiCam, and wore an ACU top and pants in that type of camouflage, along with another ACU component, the Army Combat Boot (Hot Weather). Titus wore new Corcoran Marauders in desert tan, which had been working well for him. They normally wore normal people clothes, but today it was military fatigues.

"Yeah, that's cool," Olivia said plainly but with a devious look at him over her shoulder, wiggling her hips and pulling pants, not tight enough to require so much wiggling and bouncing, up over her curvy ass with her back to him, Titus couldn't help but notice. _O__h my God you have butt dimples_, he noticed again; He forgot about that—them—sometimes. She "happened" to turn a little to the side and he simultaneously saw ass and large pale side-boob. He felt like jumping on her. He looked away. He thought about types of grass and helicopter engines and oil and lubricants whoops and motorcycles and throttle and force of thrust whoops and trees. He couldn't tell that he was meant to watch, and welcome to do more.

"Do you wanna bring Rex?" Titus asked a few seconds later, his voice turning her on further despite his totally missing a very clear, revealing, searing look—kind of a confrontation—from Olivia, who'd just done a fine job of bending over sexily, in her opinion, not knowing that he'd looked away. The plan had been to "catch" him looking and pounce. On his dick. He'd strip off of her what little clothing she had on and they'd just do it right there, right then, and get lost in each other. The door was already closed. It disappointed her that he wasn't looking, and that he'd kind of turned her down. Maybe he wasn't ready. Maybe such passive tactics didn't work on him; but that was what she was used to. Guys liked that, right? Or maybe he didn't want her. She _thought_ her signals were pretty clear, and the way she got wet just from being near him. He must have been able to smell it. He'd had lots of opportunities to, especially when they slept together. Not coincidentally they talked about sex a lot, and they knew some of what one another liked, but they'd never actually talked about having sex with each other, except vaguely. It might help if she _told_ him she wanted him. She'd never said "I want you to do (this thing) to me" or anything.

He had a strange over-sexed sexual history, though, one beginning with abuse. The first time he'd had sex when he wanted to he'd been 11 and it'd been with a much older woman. He said he still wasn't completely healthy about sex. Sometimes talking to him about sex got a little dark. With things like that all the normal rules didn't apply.

She was just worried that he'd have more of a sex drive than her, or more of an appetite, whatever you were supposed to call it. She wouldn't dwell on it, anyway, and whatever was going on with him she wouldn't worry about it, or let it make her feel any less sexy or less pretty. Maybe it didn't even mean anything, and he just wasn't in the mood right now. That happened to her too sometimes. Rarely.

Eventually she'd find a better time and make everyone but the two of them get out of their home suite and just put it in his lap and make him deal with it/give it to her/put it in her/give her the old in-and-out/please her etc. That would be good, a delicious surrender after a long build-up over months of getting to know him, wanting him the first time she saw him and wanting him more and more after that. He wouldn't disappoint her, especially not if she trapped him, ideally with her legs around him. She didn't see a problem with that.

Now, Olivia could tell his mind was elsewhere. The ploy gambit hadn't worked. Not knowing Titus continued blithely about Rex, "He could probably use a walkies, and he'd be happy to hunt varmints with you."

She shook it off. Her mind gone clear, she grinned at the use of "walkies" as he spoke and, looking back at him over her shoulder again, not deliberately sexily this time, she said, "Sure! Did I hear you playing with him earlier?"

"Yeah, that was me."

"I thought it was Arcade," Olivia said. "Why didn't you tell me right when you got here?" She said it with obviously fake irritation, but was clearly disappointed. He couldn't tell that she was mostly disappointed about something else. Something he and his mouth and tongue had been made to do. Just there, between her legs.

Pleasantly surprised at her emotional response, Titus said, "I didn't think you'd want me to bother you."

Olivia turned to face him. She had pants and boots on but her tits still out, wearing no shirt but a bra. He found it somehow more arousing than if she had only underwear on. It felt unfair that he was fully clothed. He forced his eyes away from her neck and tits and belly, and low belly just above the pelvis, up to her eyes, or her hair when he couldn't keep his eyes still.

"_You_ wouldn't bother me. That's just other people," Olivia said.

"Oh," Titus said.

Olivia hardly used her varmint rifles anymore but thought of them as classics, at least among weapons she owned. She collected weapons. So did Titus. She'd had Mick and Ralph of Freeside make a rack for her main few varmint rifles. Heh, rack. She had it mounted on one of the side walls of her—their—bedroom.

As Olivia and Titus geared up, from that horizontal wood rack she picked a Browning X-Bolt Composite Stalker, a bolt-action rifle with a free-floated barrel and a flat black finish in .223 Remington/5.56x45mm NATO, a military cartridge developed in America in the 1960s. The .223/5.56mm also became a popular varmint hunting round, the two alternative measures, Imperial or metric, being the same size but different: a rifle chambered for 5.56mm could fire .223 just fine but the other way round would likely cause damage to the weapon that fired it as the two cartridges operated at different pressures, 5.56mm at higher ones, something dangerous to mess with; the kind of thing that could make a gun warp, or explode and injure users. Olivia's American varmint rifle was chambered for .223, the one common in the country before the Great War, so she wouldn't be using her normal 5.56mm rounds but rather 55-grain .223 hollowpoints she'd loaded herself. She'd be shooting varmints; they didn't wear armor. Because she liked to over-prepare she'd also bring a loaded magazine or three of normal full metal jacket (FMJ) "hardball" rounds, officially called "ball" by the US military before the Great War; ones she'd loaded, with plain soft lead cores surrounded by hard jackets of steel.

"Do you wanna ask if anyone else wants to join us?" Titus said.

"Lemme gear up first," Olivia said thinking about it.

They both wore armored vests designed for military and private security, Olivia a five-pound female version—curvy, rather than the default straight square male version—of an old Army Improved Outer Tactical Vest (IOTV), a component of their Interceptor body armor system, plus two four-pound ballistic trauma plates (they called them "strike plates") inserted in the front and back, to hopefully stop bullets, and Titus the MMAC he'd brought with one strike plate in the front. The strike plates were National Institute of Justice (NIJ), a pre-war thing, armor standard level IV, designed to stop even armor-piercing rifle bullets. Both of their armor vests had soft layers on the outside for grids of Pouch Attachment Ladder System (PALS) webbing also developed by the US Army on the front, back and sides for various equipment, mostly ammo; Titus tended to carry more gear and gadgets than Olivia.

They'd also bring helmets they probably wouldn't need, another common wasteland-encountered old Army project, the Enhanced Combat Helmet (ECH), made of thermoplastics instead of ballistic fibers as used to be standard practice. Its generic name was a US armed forces staple; for example, it was derived from the Advanced Combat Helmet (ACH). They'd also have some knee and elbow pads in the helicopter if they needed them.

As usual Titus brought equipment for night vision he also probably wouldn't need, and they both brought backpacks with various gear and consumables, food and liquid, mostly purified water but also some Nuka-Cola and Sunset Sarsaparilla. Titus brought two cherry and grapefruit Sunset Sarsaparillas, a flavor nobody else seemed to like much. Olivia always used a simple leather backpack made after the Great War with no brands or labels or embossed names or tags, and Titus a Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment (MOLLE) II, another US armed forces gear project, rucksack.

It usually took Titus and Olivia a few minutes to prepare, including loading bullets into multiple magazines for their weapons, which could take a while and make their fingers sore—Olivia's straight stick 30-round UMP40 magazines took the longest—so they got pretty much everything on and ready before asking if any of their followers wanted to come with them.

Olivia took longer, but Titus was mostly prepared already whereas she'd been almost naked for his benefit. Titus went to the guest room and let everyone know what he and Olivia were doing and invited them to come along if they wanted to. Lily and Arcade decided to stay there. Titus asked if Arcade wanted him to bring some Dostoevsky to read. Arcade said, "Too Russian." Cass and Raúl elected to come along. For about two seconds Titus considered asking Cass for a handjob, which knowing her would escalate into full-blown penetrative vaginal sex, then thought better of it.

Like Titus, Olivia over-prepared with weapons as well as gear and ammo. She'd bring the X-Bolt varmint rifle; her Hécate 2, of course; a sub-machinegun in the same caliber as Titus's pistol, an HK _Universale Maschinenpistole_ 40 ("Universal Machine Pistol;" UMP40); which she'd have a lot of fun carrying onto the helicopter; and for her sidearm her favorite lately, a Beretta M9A3, in a Safariland M6305 holster on her right thigh.

She'd learned about such holsters, sometimes called tactical holsters though neither of them was clear on why, from Titus. You had to be careful running in them because they'd move around. He thought she looked kind of badass with the holster on. She thought the same of him in his. She felt like she'd never look as cool and calm and competent with weapons and military stuff as him, but maybe that was just insecurity.

Olivia would also bring a backup revolver, a Smith &amp; Wesson L-frame M686 Plus .357 S&amp;W Magnum 7-shot with a 2.5" barrel, in a low-profile Kydex holster on her vest. She'd be bringing plenty of ammo for everything, probably more than she'd need, as would Titus.

They'd both have a few grenades of different types.

Titus also brought several knives, like a classic combat knife—a black Gerber Mark II—and a martial-arts-leaning karambit; Olivia brought one knife, hers even more classic than Titus's Mark II, a phosphated black Ka-Bar fighting/utility knife with a synthetic rubbery Kraton handle.

Once they were packed and ready, Olivia and Titus got Cass, Raúl, ED-E and Rex and took the Lucky 38's central elevator up to the roof, where Titus's UH-60M Black Hawk was waiting for them.

As Olivia fumbled with all her long guns and gathered her hair and ponytailed it in a drab rubber band Titus said, "You can play with the miniguns, but don't shoot at anybody."

"Why not?" Olivia said.

"You'd probably kill innocents and civilians, in addition to whatever you meant to hit, and animals," Titus said.

"Who cares about animals?" Olivia said.

Rex barked.

"I do," Titus said.

"Oh. Sorry," Olivia said.

"It's okay," Titus said. Rex barked again in a supplementary tone. "Goodsprings needs their animals, too, like the bighorners, and brahmin and chickens there. I mean, wasteland penguins." Like every other post-Great War and post-FEV animal's name, "wasteland penguin" was colloquial and nonsensical. They'd been chickens before the war and FEV; after, they became scaly and ugly. Thus "penguins," somehow. Titus said, "For most of them it's their livelihood."

"I forgot they kept animals," Olivia said. "I remember the smell, though."

"It's a farming town," Titus said. After a pause he added, "I'm not gonna turn them on, anyway."

Olivia said, "What, the animals?"

"No, the miniguns," Titus said. "They need a power supply to load ammo and turn the barrels. I'm not gonna switch it on. Them on."

"Well why not?" Olivia said.

"Because with the luck you tend to have you'd probably accidentally—or not—blow up one of those stupid nuclear-powered cars and kill a bunch of NCR soldiers who were around it smoking pot or something, and then they'd blame _me_. So no minigun shooting, Olivia," Titus said, fake-sternly poking her.

"I like it when you touch me, Titus," she said, slightly dirtily. They giggled.


	4. II

**II**

_Mojave — Landing (Goodsprings, NV) — Crowd — Sunny — Powder Gang — Push to Talk_

Las Vegas and Goodsprings were both in Clark County, Nevada. Both were in the Mojave Desert, which was mostly in California but reached into Nevada, Utah and Arizona. It had an area of almost 48,000 square miles. The notorious Death Valley, home to Badwater Basin and Devil's Golf Course and Furnace Creek, was in the Mojave—in Inyo County, California—and also had the Mojave and the continent's lowest elevation, 282 feet under sea level.

The Mojave was a proper desert, too, with mountains; rain shadow; basin and range topography—it was in the USA and México's Great Basin—featuring among others the contiguous US' highest summit-peak, Mount Whitney, in the Sierra Nevada range; salt pans (aka salt flats); sand dunes; spice; giant sandworms and everything.

It had several thousand species of plants, some more common than others, such as Joshua trees (very common); various cacti, such as prickly pear and barrel cactus, especially the saguaro barrel (also known as desert barrel or miner's compass); banana yucca; buffalo gourd; silver-leafed nightshade (aka white horsenettle); datura (aka angel's trumpets, moonflowers); pinyon pine trees; mesquite, especially honey mesquite; Nevada agave; sagebrush and mugwort. People cultivated land or used planters and grew many of those plants, as well as chiles, grapes, rye, carrots, lettuce, coca, apples, pears, beets, cabbage, cannabis, desert parsley, burdock, opium poppies, turnips, radishes, mushrooms, corn, dandelions, jalapeños, several bean plants (mostly for pinto beans), and mutated fruits people called mut-fruits. A few people even grew flowers, like marigolds, roses of course, lavender, St John's wort, lilies, chamomile, echinacea, hawthorn, irises (especially yellow ones), passion flower and yarrow. Titus grew some willow trees himself.

The desert had wildlife too, some of it mutated by FEV, and some of it killed by nuclear weapons and their fallout, but most of it not. Las Vegas had been a popular target for some reason, as had some military installations, like Nellis Air Force Base, but the desert itself hadn't been; being a desert, it was mostly desert. Wildlife had come back in the Mojave in the last 204 years. If you hung around in the desert for long you'd see buzzards and hawks, bats at night, snakes (like glossy snakes and sidewinders), kangaroo mice, coyotes, hummingbirds, desert tortoises, lizards (like the slow but venomous Gila monster), spiders (including tarantulas), mule deer, pronghorn, rabbits and hares and jackrabbits, desert bighorn sheep (which mostly mutated after the Great War, and became very large), domesticated cows (also mutated; now two-headed and called brahmin), chickens (mutated), horses, donkeys, Mohave ground squirrels and several species of raven.

There were more kinds of insects than Titus could keep track of; once in a while he'd look down at an arm and there'd be something new, weird, winged and yellow on it. Or black, small and beetle-looking. He seemed to see flies the most, and sometimes bees or hornets. You saw bugs in Freeside more than anywhere else, often disgustingly like on or in food, normal-tiny-sized cockroaches and lots of flies and ants and mutated giant cockroaches and everything. Rats were pretty common in Freeside too, normal tiny ones not bigger than your foot and giant ones bigger than newborn babies too. Titus had to imagine that Las Vegas had pest problems before the war.

You could walk miles in the hot bright yellow-brown expanse of the desert and not come across anything alive, though; or not know if you had. Some slept during the day or buried themselves in sand. You'd see plants fairly often, though, especially on soft ground.

Titus, Olivia and their followers saw some animals, and all kinds of plants, sand and hills go by beneath them on the flight.

Goodsprings was about 30 miles away from the Strip. Cruising at 173 miles per hour in the UH-60M Black Hawk, Titus piloted the group of them there in minutes. It was still morning when they landed.

Titus hadn't thought much about where he could land his Black Hawk in Goodsprings, a helipad- and landing strip-less tiny town. Its pre-war population had been 229, in 107 households, most of which were lost to time. He banked around town, which took a few seconds, south and east, staying high so he wouldn't knock anything around. Few things were secured down there, very few of them at all well, and most of it was old, untouched since the time of the Great War, most famously the Prospector Saloon, which was 368 years old and looked it. The town consisted mostly of dirt and livestock. If Titus wasn't careful he might dislodge and re-landscape the whole shit and terrify the animals; the Black Hawk had a powerful rotor wash, the rush of turbulent air caused by the rapid locomotion of the helicopter's rotor blades that gave the thing lift. Titus settled on descending just east of the town, heading north, so he'd end up landing the Black Hawk about 50 yards south of the saloon on what remained of Nevada State Route 161, which led into the town. If by car he'd take the Interstate 15 and turn right onto the 161.

He landed in a flat area on the road near the big Goodsprings sign, which was short enough not to be a problem for the helicopter's rotor blades, but after touchdown he noticed he'd also accidentally blown over a pre-war telephone pole by the road sometime during the descent. He'd apologize to Trudy for that, but he didn't think she'd care; the poles stood, but the power and phone lines were long since out of use and broken down or sold for scrap.

It took Titus a lot of flight time in helicopters and planes to get any good in either. It'd seemed like kind of a waste of time back when he'd been doing it, mostly in Kentucky, but it was worth it now. He knew what he was doing. He was a relatively good, safe pilot. And a considerate one—he didn't let Olivia minigun anyone. She got a funny look in her eye when she saw some of the bighorner pens in Goodsprings.

As it got closer to the ground, the Black Hawk began kicking up more and more dirt and dust, little cyclones of it in oddly orderly waves and pulses. The clouds of sand and detritus didn't appear to make it into Goodsprings, except for some that landed on one house and a trailer by it and some fencing.

The noise and sight of the big flying machine made it to the town before the helicopter did. They would've heard it coming. Titus flew relatively high but fast, and the mountains around the area tended to hold sound in, tunneling it. They wouldn't have seen it until it was close, though.

By the time Titus began to land he'd gathered a crowd, which he hadn't expected but shouldn't have been surprised by. Showy technology tended to draw people's attention, and Titus's Black Hawk wasn't just a little weapon or armor or something, it could fucking fly. He was proud of it but didn't like the attention it called to him at all. Back east he'd already been famous, and now he was famous in the west too. Fame was just attention, in the public eye, and he mostly didn't like attention; It made him a target, along with a very few positives, like sometimes people vying for his attention or giving him things.

The only people who were really cool with his fame were about the most anti-social faction he'd ever encountered, the Boomers of Nellis Air Force Base, formerly of Vault 34. Titus was very close with the Boomers. He was in the process of re-equipping them and strengthening their perimeter security, and he still flew with them a lot, mostly training, practice and instructional stuff. In the last few months they'd also started together a drone—unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—program which was very useful in addition to being an awful lot of fun.

It appeared that everyone in Goodsprings had turned out—all ten of them—plus a few merchants on their way through; Titus had seen a pack brahmin and a shopping cart in town. He hoped the crowd he'd inspired wouldn't get any closer before he powered down or the flying sand would irritate their eyes, or maybe the rotor wash would knock them over, or rip their clothes off. Well, maybe that wouldn't be so bad. Sometimes under a flying helicopter it could get difficult to breathe, or stand, or keep loose clothes on, and that was if nothing got blown into you. He worried about bags of plants and Sunset Sarsaparilla boxes. He didn't see anybody get hit with anything or fall over, though. Just people standing around shading and clearing out their eyes.

Titus was tall, around 6'6", and the UH-60M's bubble cockpit was a little tight and awkward for him; Practical space constraints. When he piloted things he was frequently reminded that apparently before the Great War it was best for a pilot to be short, or at least not tall, for example less than 6', and less than 5'8" even better, especially for fighter pilots because of G-forces and the physics of speed, acceleration, bodily fluids and gravity.

He went through his checklist and powered down the helicopter, taking his time. It was best not to rush. Olivia opened one of the side doors and everybody piled out. Checklist done, Titus took off his flight helmet. Olivia, he noticed, had stored her big Hécate 2 under his SRS on a locking metal rack he'd installed on the back wall of the passenger-or-cargo compartment. His HK417 was also in it. There were small rack seats against the front and back walls facing inward.

The various Goodsprings personalities started clapping and cheering as Olivia and company started getting out. After them, Titus got out of his pilot's door at the front of the Black Hawk. Olivia was directing people to him. They gathered around him.

"What the hell _is_ that thing?" one asked.

"Holy crap, Titus!" Doc Mitchell said, in a congratulatory tone. Titus was pretty sure he meant the helicopter.

"Wow," Easy Pete said.

As everybody else bothered him with too many questions to answer or hear clearly, Titus saw a young good-looking guy in a caravaneer outfit, a brown and yellow flannel shirt and denim suspender pants, whom he didn't recognize, but before Titus could talk to him to see who he was the guy wandered off and Titus didn't see where he went.

People went on talking to Titus excitedly for a while.

In the meantime, Olivia walked away to talk to Sunny Smiles, who was too taken aback by how attractive Titus was even in armor to try speaking to him, as she immediately told Olivia. "You've told me about him, but you never mentioned a helicopter," she also said; She'd read about them but never seen pictures or evidence of them.

Olivia had her followers stay with Titus for the time being. Rex looked very conflicted about whom to go with; Olivia beckoned for him to come with her, Sunny and Cheyenne, Sunny's dog companion, an excited perky German Shepherd.

After the rest of the town's population cleared out and went back to raking dirt, the Prospector Saloon's owner and the town's unofficial mayor, Trudy, came up to Titus and started talking as if he was looking at her or already knew she wanted to talk to him. He still heard her, though, and shortly looked to her, and paid attention to something other than Olivia's ass, which he couldn't really see under her bulky IOTV anyway. "Look," Trudy said, "I know we don't know each other real well, but I know Olivia and what she thinks of you, and you have a good reputation. I think we need your help."

"'We' like Goodsprings?" Titus said.

"Yeah," Trudy said, and told him: Their little town had become involved with something bad to do with the Powder Gangers, on account of a sorta flinty guy named Ringo who'd come to town, and recently some of the convicts at large had come looking for Ringo.

The Powder Gangers were these loosely affiliated convicts from the NCR—glorified raiders; highwaymen; bandits—brought to Nevada and given explosives to clear and rebuild railroads to connect the Mojave with the rest of the NCR, like its self-named capital city formerly called Shady Sands, and the Boneyard, formerly called Los Angeles, California, the City of Lost Angels. The convicts hadn't been treated well. They'd revolted and overtaken their prison, called the NCR Correctional Facility, which had been the Southern Nevada Correctional Center before the war, using explosives and killing all their guards. Now they harassed and robbed and raped and killed travelers on I-15, often called the Long 15, raiding caravans as well as unaffiliated people, or NCR or Caesar's Legion soldiers alike.

More recently one of them who said he had more men with him had come back to Goodsprings, to make threats about Ringo and burning down the town, and Trudy wasn't sure what to do. She kind of hoped Ringo would sneak out of town and leave, but said that if Titus and Olivia helped the guy Goodsprings would appreciate it.

"Do you mind if I go talk to her about it?" Titus asked.

"Sure, go ahead. I'll be in the saloon if you're thirsty," Trudy said.

Titus said "Come on, guys," to his followers. "We're gonna go find Olivia."

Titus, Cass, Raúl and ED-E checked Chet's general store and Sunny's usual hangout, the saloon, but Olivia and Sunny weren't in either. They didn't see her, Sunny, Rex or Cheyenne out in Goodsprings. It would be a waste of time to check all the houses in town.

"They're prob'ly out hunting," Titus said to his followers.

"Yeah. She likes to shoot things," Raul said.

Titus and Olivia, before leaving the Lucky 38, had made sure their hand-held radios were both on the same tactical channel. They both had scanners, so they'd hear more than one channel; not that anybody else used radios, apart from the NCR and sometimes Powder Gangers, who used common unencrypted civilian channels anyway. Titus had meant to double-check with her about which channel they were on before they left the helicopter, but she'd headed out without him. Maybe she thought he liked or wanted the attention. Hopefully she hadn't changed channels.

Titus made sure his radio was on (it was) and the volume not too high or off, then used, hooked to his armored vest at the shoulder, the big black round push-to-talk (PTT) button component of his fancy throat microphone headset, a TEA Los Angeles SWAT Headset (LASH) II.

"Hey Pretty Lady, this is Dapper Gentleman. Do you hear me? Over," he said into the radio. His fancy LASH II throat mic was a black band wrapped around his neck that picked up the vibrations of his larynx directly; he didn't have to aim his mouth at a boom mic, like with the one Olivia used. His transmitted little background noise, and worked just fine in loud environments. Hers was different.

A second later he heard her say, in his little earpiece: "Hey handsome, this is Pretty Lady. I can hear you well. What's up? Over."

"Are you out varmint huntin'? Over," Titus said.

"As a matter of fact I am," Olivia came back. "I'm south of town right now. There's geckos about! Over."

"Sounds exciting, Pretty Lady," Titus said. "Over."

To Olivia, Sunny said, "Who are you talking to?" Olivia was using a headset, talking into a mic that wrapped around to her mouth, and hearing Titus in a headphone over one ear. Sunny couldn't hear him.

Olivia said to Sunny, "I'm talking to Titus." Like him, she had her headset on PTT. She pressed a little button, on a line that led from the headset through her shirtsleeve to her hand, and said to Titus, "I don't think darlin' Sunny's used a radio before, over."

Sunny grinned.

"Can you switch to voice-actuated, please? Over," Titus said.

"Sure. Over," Olivia said and switched from PTT to the voice-operated switch, abbreviated Voice Operated eXchange (VOX).

"Could you please pass Sunny the headset for a second? Over," Titus said.

Olivia did it. Sunny shifted the spider-looking thing onto her head for a second and then heard a slightly tinny, slightly distorted but fairly clear Titus's voice saying, "Hi, Sunny! This is Titus. If you wanna talk back to me just talk like normal."

"Hi, Titus!" Sunny said. "You have a cute voice."

"Thank you, Sunny," Titus said. "You have a cute voice too. Are you guys having a good time?"

"Yeah, so far!" Sunny said. "It's a little exciting."

"Cool," Titus said. "Could you hand the headset back to Olivia, please?"

"Sure," Sunny said.

A couple seconds later Olivia's voice said, "You have a cute voice, Dapper Gentleman. Over." Titus was pretty sure he heard giggling.

"Thank you," Titus said. "I heard her say that too. Over."

Olivia laughed.

"What?" Sunny asked her.

"He said 'I heard her say that too.' It was just funny," Olivia said to Sunny, then thought to switch her headset back to PTT, feeling silly that Titus had just heard her say all that. Sunny smiled at Olivia's expression. Olivia pushed her talk button and said to Titus, "So yeah, we're just huntin' varmints, over."

"There's sort of a situation here with the Powder Gangers," Titus said. "When you get back I'll brief you on it, okay? Over."

Olivia replied, "Sounds good, baby. Over."

"Did you just call me 'baby,' Pretty Lady? Over," Titus said.

"Yes I did and thank you for the compliment, over," Olivia said, chuckling.

"You're welcome. Over," Titus said, also chuckling.

"Talk to you later, baby," Olivia said. "Over and out."

Titus laughed.


	5. III

**III**

_Plan — Militia — Critters — Ringo — Para Bellum — Boomers — Takeoff — Light Load — Merchants — Tracking Targets — Briefing — Manpack — Go Team! — ooxxoXOXx, or Parting Words — Communication_

Titus thought for a while, walking around Goodsprings aimlessly, sharpening one of his knives. He talked to Trudy, then Ringo about what had happened.

Joe Cobb and his gang of an unknown amount of other Powder Gangers were going to attack Goodsprings. It didn't seem like there was a way around an eventual gun-and-dynamite fight. Titus decided to ask around in Goodsprings and see if anybody would help; He thought they all might. Ringo said that he should go to Sunny first, so Titus went back outside and called Olivia over the radio again.

"Do you mind if I talk to Sunny? I—actually, could you just use your radio's speaker without the headset? I could hear you both that way. Over," Titus said.

"You might do that for us, too, Titus," Raúl said.

"Shut up, Raúl," Titus said. Joking.

"Yeah, sure," Olivia was saying over radio. "Just a second. Uh, break." It was several seconds. Background noise increased when she spoke again; Titus could tell that Olivia had her PIP-Boy's radio on, probably tuned to Mojave Music Radio. "It's a Sin" by the Pet Shop Boys was playing. Titus liked that song. It beat "Johnny Guitar" again—Titus liked that song too but was kind of tired of it. "Okay, here we go," Olivia said. "What's up? Over."

"Hi guys! Over," Titus said.

"Hi Titus!" Sunny said. "Sticking around Goodsprings for awhile longer?"

"Say 'over' when you're done talking," Olivia said in the background.

"Over," Sunny said. "Question mark." The sound transmitting cut out after that.

Titus laughed, then replied: "I am indeed, Sunny, comma, full stop." Olivia and Sunny laughed but he didn't hear it. "There's a situation here with Ringo and the Powder Gangers. I kind of assume you already know all about that. Do you? Over."

"Yeah," Sunny said into the radio.

"Over," Olivia said and let go of the talk button.

Titus laughed at the way Olivia said it.

"Sorry," Sunny said to Olivia. Titus didn't hear it.

"Dammit, Sunny," Olivia managed to say before laughing. "It's fine."

"I'm gonna help Ringo take on Joe Cobb and his stupid gang," Titus said over radio. "Help defend him here, I mean. They're probably just going to attack. I might need your help, Sunny. Over."

"Say no—" Sunny began, then noticed that Olivia wasn't pushing down the radio's talk button, so Titus couldn't hear her, so she put her finger over Olivia's and pushed down. "Is it down now? Can he hear me?" she whispered, but over the radio Titus heard her too.

"Yeah," Olivia said. Titus could hear her grinning.

"Say no more, I'm in," Sunny said into the radio. Olivia was looking at her lips. "Over," Sunny added, and Olivia let go of the button.

"That was confusing for a second," Titus said back. He didn't hear the giggles. "You're in, Sunny? Just like that? Over."

"Just like that," Sunny said. "I have a feeling I'm going to end up fighting those guys one way or another, so I might as well get it over with. Joe Cobb talks about leaving us alone if we hand over Ringo, but I know his type. He and his friends _will_ come after the town eventually."

Sunny said he should convince Trudy and some other people in town to help. He talked with her about that for a few minutes, thinking about what to do and how he should do it. She suggested he get dynamite from Easy Pete, which he was tempted to do, but he decided not to, mostly concerned that Goodspringers inexperienced in using explosives even if instructed well would accidentally kill each other and their livestock and damage buildings.

He also thought about seeing people trying to fight the gigantic FEV-mutated creatures of the wasteland, and seeing most of those people torn limb from limb.

Pondering it all, weighing options and considering tactics and sharpening a knife again, Titus went to his Black Hawk. He posted ED-E there to take advantage of the wiry eyebot's advanced sensors. If ED-E detected Joe Cobb and company coming it was to immediately come find Titus or Olivia and tell them. Well, tell Titus; Whatever ED-E said wouldn't make sense to Olivia.

Titus was pretty sure the Powder Gangers would approach from the main road into town, from the south, heading northwest, their path going through the Black Hawk. The Powder Gangers were mostly based at the NCRCF in Jean, Nevada, an unincorporated town before the Great War bigger than Goodsprings, south and mostly east of Goodsprings on I-15. There was also a separate group of them living in Vault-Tec Vault 19, a good ways northeast of Goodsprings between it and Vegas.

Titus was thinking about advanced warning, the Boomers, and his small fleet of drones—at last count he had eight fully operational, and most of the parts for sixteen or so more of several different types of them, big and obvious or small and stealthy. Some of them had parts commonality, as the military liked to call it.

While Titus went around Goodsprings talking to and enlisting people, Olivia and Sunny cleared creeping wilderness from the town, such as giant purple lizards everyone called geckos, giant horseflies called bloatflies, giant American cockroaches everyone called radroaches, and giant praying mantises. Anything giant but normally mundane and tiny alongside humans, really. A few of them were wandering around inside the town. They also saw some normal flies and a dark snake and a normal little red scorpion, which they didn't need to kill to keep Goodsprings safe. Sunny was a ranger for the town. She made her living mostly by selling the hides of critters she killed, like the giant geckos. Olivia enjoyed switching between weapons, but mostly used her varmint rifle, the X-Bolt, for it all. On the giant mantises she used her sidearm the M9A3 and her Ka-Bar.

The Pistol, Semiautomatic, 9mm, M9, specifically the M9A3, was old US military issue, a normal civilian-available Beretta Model 92FS (M92FS; "F" for US government federal testing, "S" for a slide-mounted combined safety and de-cocking lever) ordered and built to military specifications. The Italian company Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta S.p.A.—_Società per azioni_, meaning public company—was a firearms manufacturer before the Great War founded 1526. Their M9A3 was a 9x19mm Parabellum National Guard weapon. Before the Great War by at least 20 years the active duty and especially forward-deployed military standard issue sidearms had been plasma or laser pistols, varying by branch, ballistic carbon-based firearms out of favor, for the few soldiers issued sidearms (mainly special forces and officers). Before that, the US armed forces had gone from the old standard M9 series they'd had since 1985 to the N80 and then N99, an ugly blocky Desert Eagle Mark I clone with excessive ornamentation that felt like shooting a brick.

Midway through varmint hunting, Olivia noticed she'd been drinking too much water and had to come back to town to pee, which she most definitely did not tell Titus about. She didn't want him to know that she even had such bodily functions as peeing and pooping and farting. Burping was safe because she'd accidentally let that slip once or twice and he hadn't cared, been somehow offended _or_ made fun of her for it. She was vaguely aware that all such things might happen to him sometimes.

After Olivia used the saloon's only working bathroom, the women's, and washed her hands, she and Sunny checked in with Titus, or for Sunny mostly flirted with him. He flirted back, but Olivia could tell he was pretty into working out the whole Powder Gangers fight thing. She was interested too.

"I'm gonna see if there's anything far out on the north side of town," Sunny told Olivia and Titus, her eyes mostly on him. "If there are many of them I'll come get you, okay?" Titus was pretty sure she meant Olivia.

"Sounds good," Olivia said. She looked to Titus. "So you're gonna protect Goodsprings?"

He smiled. "Yeah."

"For me?" she asked.

He didn't laugh, but on the inside he thought that was absurd. He said, "No. Why? Do you want it to be for you? We can say it's for you."

Looking at him, Olivia smiled. A real smile, ear to ear and eye to eye, not just lips. Then she looked away. Then she looked back to him and said, "Do you mind if we go talk to Ringo?"

Titus liked that she assumed he'd go with her. He felt included. "Sure," he said.

A few seconds later, when Sunny was still in view and Titus wasn't looking at her ass, he saw her bringing something up to her mouth and didn't think anything of it. He was thinking about where he'd encountered the highest concentration of radscorpions. Olivia was checking out her own shadow, with her varmint rifle strapped across her back and her HK UMP40 up in her arms. She looked absurd. As fraught with danger and insecurity as the Mojave wasteland was, Titus knew that for this Olivia wouldn't need to have the sub-machinegun at the ready. At all. He didn't say so, though. Olivia liked her guns.

Mostly for that reason she'd attached a lot of accoutrements to the UMP40: a reflex sight—an EOTech Holographic Weapon Sight (HWS) Model 552—a vertical forward handgrip under the barrel, and on the right side a red visible laser sight, all three on the gun's Picatinny rails. It also came standard with a side-folding, locking metal stock.

Then Titus heard Sunny's voice in his earpiece saying, "Hey Titus. Who would win in a fight? You or Olivia? Over." He could hear her talking out loud, without the radio, too.

Without thinking about it Titus said back, "_I_ would—"

Olivia looked at him like "Oh really?"

Titus looked to Olivia grinning and continued over the radio, "—I would, because I'd punch her in the ovaries. Over."

Olivia started laughing, hard. Sunny probably heard that without the radio. Sunny laughed too. Their laughing made Titus laugh.

"You gave her a radio?" Titus asked Olivia after the laughing stopped, as they walked.

"Yeah," Olivia said. "My backup."

Maybe a minute later when Olivia and Titus were almost at the Poseidon Oil gas station up the hill that Ringo was lying low in, they both heard Sunny's voice in their ears remotely again. Sunny said, "Hey Olivia? What's your favorite kind of horse? Over."

Titus was smiling. Olivia smiled back at him before answering, "I'd have to say a brown horse. Over." They laughed. So did Sunny. Olivia went on, "Actually, Sunny, we're about to talk to Ringo, so could you please not call us unless it's an emergency? Over."

"Okay. Over," Sunny said. She sounded perfectly chipper.

"Cool," Olivia said. "Over and out. That means you're all done talking. Um . . . out."

"See you later, buddy," Sunny said. "Over and out."

Ringo answered them at the gas station's door opening by pointing his Browning Hi-Power at Titus again, then at Olivia, from the hip. If he fired he'd likely miss, but Titus and Olivia both didn't like their chances. Titus didn't think much when it was pointed at him, but when Ringo pointed the gun from him to Olivia, Titus got a little angry about it.

"You better not fire that thing, you prick," Olivia said.

Titus could see why she would distinctly dislike having another of that same pistol pointed at her; two months ago she'd almost been killed by one shooting her in the head. Despite use of stimpacks she still had scars, but her hair had grown back in, luckily _before_ she talked to Titus without having a helmet or a hat on to cover the bald spots. In his defense Titus had looked over Doctor Mitchell's work before and said he wouldn't have found it ugly, but Olivia didn't like her chances there either.

Having a gun pointed at her in general bothered her more than Titus. It would still hurt to get shot with, even if it was only a 9x19mm Parabellum. Titus used to know a guy who carried a 9x19mm pistol and shot a prisoner in the chest with it at point blank range, and the prisoner didn't even seem bothered by it; The prisoner had just looked down at the bleeding wound, then back up at the guy with a look like, "You shot me." So the guy shot the prisoner again, in the head, and soon switched to a .45 ACP pistol. The 9mm Parabellum was designed in 1901 by Georg Luger, its name actually two separate Latin words, _para bellum_, "for war" in English—from the phrase "_Si vis pacem, para bellum_;" "If you want peace, prepare for war;" which also happened to be the motto of the company Luger had worked for, _Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken_ (DWM; "German Weapons and Munitions"). Olivia probably couldn't identify Ringo's pistol in the dark, but the point stood.

"She's with me, she's okay," Titus said, directing the muzzle of the sub-gun in Olivia's arms, pointed at about Ringo's balls-level, gently away from Ringo, though at the same time Titus felt his other hand itching to pull out his own sidearm and shoot Ringo. For whatever reason, Titus distinctly didn't want to acknowledge that as a member of the male human sex Ringo likely had testicles, just anatomically, but Titus still didn't want the guy to get shot in the balls he might or might not have; He didn't deserve that.

"Oh," Ringo said. "Sorry. You just caught me off-guard, is all."

"When are you _on_ guard?" Titus said.

Ringo looked at Titus, then looked away sheepishly.

Titus wasn't wearing all of his gear and armor, but Olivia had on all of her gear but her backpack—she wore her IOTV and had a rifle on her back and was wielding at Ringo a big boxy powerful-looking sub-gun with complicated futuristic doohickeys sticking off of it in places. She'd be intimidating to lesser mortals, Titus thought.

"Either of you guys wanna play caravan?" Ringo asked them.

"No thanks," Olivia said, thumbing the UMP40's pictographic fire selector from fully-automatic back to safe, from red to white, and lowering the weapon. She liked money, but not caravan or gambling.

"Nah," Titus said.

"Ah, nuts," Ringo said, put out.

For a few minutes, Olivia asked pretty much the same questions Titus had before and got pretty much the same answers. That was probably a good thing, though, that Ringo's answers didn't change with a beautiful woman present. Then again, Ringo seemed more interested in Titus than Olivia; He had before too.

As the talking about ambushed caravans and Powder Gangers wound down, Olivia and Titus both heard Sunny in their ears again; she said, "Hey Olivia? There are some radscorpions north of town. Wanna come along with me to clear them out? Over.

Titus looked to Olivia and said, "Do you wanna take that?"

"Yeah," Olivia said, stepping away to talk to Sunny.

"What are you guys talkin' about?" Ringo said.

"Radios," Titus said.

"What's that?" Ringo said.

"It's a ranged communication device," Titus said.

"No, I meant what was it about," Ringo said, but Titus wasn't convinced.

"Sunny Smiles just called her," Titus said.

"How many are there? Over," Olivia was saying to Sunny over radio.

"I saw at least three and one big one, but there might be more," Sunny said. "Over."

"I'll go get my big gun," Olivia said. "Could you meet me out by the helicopter? Over."

"Sure. Over," Sunny said.

"I guess we're pretty much done here," Titus said to Ringo.

"Okay. Over and out," Olivia said to Sunny.

"Did you want somethin' else?" Ringo asked Titus.

"No," Titus said. He looked to Olivia.

"She didn't say 'over and out,'" Olivia said to him, worried.

Titus shrugged.

He looked back to Ringo and said, "Yeah. See you later, Ringo."

Outside, Olivia, worried, called Sunny back over the radio, fearing that Sunny had charged into the midst of a herd of radscorpions or something, but she hadn't; she'd just forgot the formality of "and out."

"See? She's smarter than that," Titus said.

"Yeah, but you never know," Olivia said. "People act weird sometimes."

As they walked away to the helicopter, Olivia briefly considered asking Titus outright, "Wanna take me into one of these houses 'n' fuck me?" but she never said it. All she really did was check him out.

They headed for Titus's helicopter and met up with Sunny on the way. Titus had had all their followers wait for them by the general store and the saloon. Only Raúl was still outside; The others had gone into the saloon.

"I'm gonna use my Black Hawk's radio for a minute," Titus said.

"Your holster?" Olivia said. Titus shook his head, smiling. "What is that, again?"

"The helicopter. It's a Sikorsky UH-60M Black Hawk," Titus said.

"Whoops," Olivia said, embarrassed to have forgotten any military jargon.

"It has a lot of names," Titus said. "No worries." It didn't seem to make her feel better.

He changed the subject to the plan he was working on, which he knew would take her mind off of it and which he needed to catch her up on anyway.

He'd need the longer range of his helicopter's radios to talk to the Boomers. He'd given them a lot of radios, for internal communications as well as external with him, partly just to make sure that when he next flew in they wouldn't try to shoot him down again. Olivia thought his plan was awesome, crazy, perfect and loved it. He said he didn't appreciate the superlative. She said she meant it as a good thing. He said oh. In her opinion, Titus had just thought of the best, coolest, funniest possible way to deal with the Powder Gangers. Sunny didn't think any of it would work, not even the finding the radscorpions part, and she was still having trouble believing radios could work. Also she hadn't heard of the Boomers before.

As Olivia retrieved her Hécate 2 and ammo for it, Titus talked with her and Sunny about the plan.

Then he turned on the radios in his Black Hawk and hailed the Boomers, not expecting this to work out. He didn't even think they'd answer. But they did, and then it all did work out. When he told them he wanted to do a UAV exercise, they got excited. He said he didn't intend to use them to kill anything . . . but then, when he said he thought the Boomers should still load the two drones with 100-pound Air-to-Ground Missile (AGM)-114R Hellfire (from "helicopter-launched, fire-and-forget missile") IIs, they got even more excited. He worked out the basic plan with the Boomers on duty, and Sunny and Olivia.

The Boomers would need three people to run each drone. That worked out well too. Titus felt a little weird about it, despite nonviolent direct intentions, but some of the people on the drone crews would be ones Titus liked to call Boomer Tots: Boomer children. They weren't quite like normal children; They trained as pilots in the Boomers' virtual reality fighter jet training stations just as Boomer adults did, and were expected to pull their weight at Nellis, albeit a small one, like anybody else. It still felt kind of wrong to Titus though.

Not being present at the Nellis Air Force Base runway himself made Titus uneasy. He was almost sure that one of the drones' takeoffs would go wrong. But after just a few minutes of nearly constant conversation—he felt sorry for his bored followers—the two huge General Atomics Extended Range MQ-9 Reapers (Department of Defense designations: "M" for multi-role, "Q" meaning remotely-piloted aircraft system), also called Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs), were in the air, and hadn't crashed, and were both on their way to the Goodsprings area. Both Nellis AFB and Goodsprings were in Clark County, Nevada. The Reapers had a 66-foot wingspan, were 36 feet long, 12.5 feet tall, and had a range of 1,150 miles and a cruise speed even faster than Titus's Black Hawk; they'd be in the area of operations real quick. At a high altitude—a ceiling of 50,000 feet, though they wouldn't be quite that high—they'd start being useful before they were close. If Titus remembered the geography right, the drones' high-resolution cameras might've already been able to see Goodsprings.

The Boomers were even better than Titus at working his drones. (He'd given them a few for their own use but they never used them; theirs just sat around collecting irradiated dust.) Then again, there were a good deal more Boomers than Tituses, and the Boomers trained for stuff like that every day. They were a martial society.

Drones like the MQ-9 Reaper required satellites to work. Titus had never launched a satellite of his own into space before, though he wanted to sometime. Despite the weapons used in the impressively destructive two hours of the Great War, the third World War, and what they'd done to the planet and the life it had supported before, a great deal of the many satellites in Earth orbit hadn't been destroyed or electronically fried by all the nuclear weapons' electromagnetic pulses (EMPs); A lot of military/defense satellites and even civilian ones were still floating around out there. Hacking into some of them—in truth, Titus had hacked into quite a few more of them than even he thought he'd need, collecting them—had been disappointingly easy. The encryption software was all old. Titus had expected it to be inexplicably and maybe even artificially difficult, like most things. But even after it had all been set up and tested and then worked properly, satellites and UAVs and UCAVs and ground control and lots of cables and computers and equipment and everything, Titus had still not believed it would work out. He still thought it might all fail spontaneously. It was why he didn't use them all the time. He didn't think to use them very much.

Titus worked out all the rest of the plan with Olivia and Sunny, who'd gone back to varmint hunting, over radio, and with the Boomers, in the process of the drones' liftoff. Once those were in the air he picked up a manpack radio, in a backpack, from inside his helicopter that he'd need to keep talking with the Boomers. It wasn't heavy. He put the backpack on. It was fairly comfortable—which was good as he'd need to do a lot of running with it on quite soon.

Before leaving the helicopter to go work out the plan with the rest of Goodsprings' population, he called over radio his base of operations—he needed to give it some cool name; at the moment he just called it his "lab facility thing"—for his frequent copilot, Viana, an ex-NCR military vertibird pilot with a lot of experience in her 40s, who was on duty today. She was one of his several employees. The others were scientists, lab assistants and researchers—Titus funded a lot of research—and a full-time mechanic and a dog walker. Viana's part of the plan was the easiest: he'd just pick her up in his Black Hawk. She was ready and eager to fly. Titus was the only way she got to fly anymore.

Titus also put on a flat dark earth 5.11 Tactical VTAC (Viking Tactics, a pre-war company) LBE (Load-Bearing Equipment) vest, a basic MOLLE vest, which he'd had in the helicopter, to carry ammo and a few grenades, and took off a lot of the gear he'd been lugging around and stored it in the Black Hawk. He'd move his MMAC and rucksack and SRS-A1 rifle up onto the roof with Olivia later. He removed the M26 MASS from his HK417A2; except for maybe 3" magnum slug rounds, shotguns and buckshot in general were ineffective against the rugged exoskeletons of radscorpions; useless; dead weight. Fortunately, the removal of the shotgun only took about 10 seconds and didn't require special tools. He stored it in the helicopter.

Whatever they'd want to do about it, the traveling merchants in town needed to be warned of the gunfight coming. Olivia and Titus got together and looked for them.

One was in the saloon. They found her first. Loaded with a surplus of bighorner and big purple gecko hides and a wicker basket of wasteland penguin eggs, her pack brahmin was tied up outside. Titus and Olivia talked to her inside; Sunny, Cheyenne, Rex and ED-E joined them. Titus and Olivia had their other followers just hang around wherever they liked, which for Raúl was wandering around town and Cass in the saloon.

"We thought we should tell you: You might want to finish up your business and get out of here, for the time being," Titus told the merchant.

"Why's that?" the merchant said after a sip of beer, looking between Titus and Olivia and Sunny.

"Have you heard about the thing with the Powder Gangers?" Olivia asked her.

"A little, yeah," she said. "I was in here when that guy in the prison guard outfit confronted Trudy. Demanded, more like. It was a little while ago."

"'Demanded' is right," Sunny said. "I was there too. I heard him."

"_That's_ why," Olivia said. "Sometime probably soon the Powder Gangers are gonna attack this place."

"Do you have any guards? Or mercs that travel with you?" Titus said.

"No," the merchant said. "It's just little ol' me."

_Not a wise choice_, Titus and Olivia thought.

"We were gonna go talk to the other merchants coming through here," Olivia said. "You guys might want to travel south together for protection."

"Or north," Titus said, looking between the merchant and Olivia. "We cleared those deathclaws outta there, and just moments ago you and Sunny cleared some radscorpions out too, right?"

"Yeah, that's true," Olivia said. "I didn't think of that. Oh! There are cazadores up there too, though."

"Shit, that's right, there are a couple nests up that way," he said, grimacing, then said to the merchant, "Or south to Primm, or whatever. If you want you could stay there a day or two, then come back, pero . . . if you wanted to do more here."

"No, I already got done all the trading I was gonna do," the merchant said, nursing her beer.

Titus shrugged. "I kinda thought so."

The other two merchants were about in town, one in Chet's general store and one in Doc Mitchell's house, buying things. After no persuasion they both agreed to travel with the third merchant for safety. One of them had a hired guard. One of them was slow for having to push a little metal skeleton goods cart. The merchants, guard and two pack brahmin shuffled off together that afternoon, heading south to Primm.

Titus assembled most of the temporary Goodsprings militia, including Trudy, to talk to them and told them he was going to be moving as fast as possible. He had two UCAVs (they didn't seem to understand what that was, though he explained it) watching their area, as well as all the Powder Ganger camps he knew about, as he'd synced his PIP-Boy's maps with the Boomers' gear and all the technology for use with the drones; they'd also be watching the Powder Gangers' base—the prison in Jean—and tracking a large number of targets they'd identified visually as Powder Gangers.

Meaning they actually looked like Powder Gangers and wore their outfits, not just were people who might happen to be around them. Not that many innocents would associate with them; Powder Gangers attacked everybody. The major powers, the NCR and Caesar's Legion, both hated the Powder Gangers, and the NCR and the Legion didn't agree on anything, though the Legion appreciated the Gangers causing trouble in the NCR.

Most importantly, the Boomers had quickly located Joe Cobb and would be watching him.

The riskiest part of the plan, once Joe and gang started moving, was what Titus would be doing; distance running, and pissing off a lot of radscorpions. The people of Goodsprings were to hold their ground from cover and not especially risk harm; If Titus's plan worked perfectly, which it wouldn't, they wouldn't even get shot at. Worst-case scenario: there were probably more Goodspringers than there would be Powder Gangers, and with Olivia, and Titus's very lethal drones, they were also much better armed, and would have cover and knew the area. They might also be able to use the several armaments of Titus's Black Hawk, namely the miniguns, depending on how well that end of the plan worked out.

If Titus had any radio problems, the plan probably wouldn't work, so if Titus didn't check in with or didn't respond to the Boomer crews for too long they were to just missile-strike the shit out of Joe Cobb and any Powder Gangers with him.

Until Cobb started moving, Titus needed to be a lot further south at soonest. He was nervous and excited to go try this. He'd carry along his HK417. Loaded it weighed nine pounds—less than his SRS and M14 EBR, the weapons he'd been carrying the most lately. He was also very strong; He could run with the HK417 in his arms and it wouldn't slow him down.

Before Olivia and Titus coordinated with ladders getting everybody on top of the Prospector Saloon for the impending gunfight, Titus ran back to his helicopter and brought out another bag with a manpack radio in it for Olivia. It had a range of hundreds of miles, much better than the few miles of their handhelds. This way she'd be able to talk to him throughout his long run; if she wanted she could listen in on what the Boomers were saying too.

Before they went to the roof of the saloon, Olivia, Titus and Sunny went to get Ringo from the derelict gas station he was hiding in.

When they opened the door, Ringo didn't greet them by pointing a weapon at them; probably an improvement, for Ringo's safety anyway. Instead, Olivia and Sunny went in first, and didn't even see Ringo. They became worried.

Titus came in a second later and because he looked around a lot immediately saw Ringo, to the left of the entrance door, standing close to the corner there and staring at the wall, completely silent. Titus pointed him out. Olivia became really creeped out and yelped. Sunny didn't seem bothered by it. When they spoke to Ringo to tell him it was time to get ready, Ringo acted completely normal.

Titus brought out a ladder from a willing Goodspringer's house and helped Ringo onto the roof of the general store, along with a few other Goodspringers. Olivia refused to be anywhere near Ringo, so she and Sunny and her followers helped bring two ladders to the saloon. More people would be atop there.

Titus's last touches before leaving were to help Olivia, Trudy, Sunny, Cass, Raúl, and Cheyenne and Rex, who could both climb ladders, up onto the roof of the Prospector Saloon; ED-E just flew up. For the duration of the gunfight, Ringo would be just across the alley, where everyone could see him, on the roof of Chet's general store; Chet would be inside it cowering. Titus stored his armored utility vest with some of his normal gear in it, his MOLLE II rucksack, and his SRS for fighting radscorpions, if they weren't all dead by the time he got back up to it, on the roof with Olivia.

Olivia, Trudy, Sunny and Titus worked with ropes and a few of Olivia and Titus's followers to bring up onto the roof of the saloon crates, barrels and a small stepladder so the three of them could look out over the tall façade of the Prospector Saloon, to shoot down at the Powder Gangers and probably radscorpions. There weren't enough things around to boost others, who'd have to shoot around the edges or something.

Olivia set the manpack radio at her feet and plugged her headset into it.

Then she stood on her stacked Sunset Sarsaparilla crates and gleefully deployed her Hécate 2's built-in hinged bipod, rested the weapon's weight on the lip at the edge of the roof, and unlocked the rifle's bolt, moving steel back and forth to chamber a round larger than her hand. _I should've cleaned this today_, she thought; It didn't move quite as smoothly as it should've.

Titus said, "It might be a couple hours before you need that," looking up at her from the normal height of the roof. He was much taller than her but still had to look up. He added, "Speaking of which, sudden thought: Cobb might wait to attack until night, or something. We'll deal with that if it's what happens."

Olivia removed the Hécate 2's magazine, which weighed three pounds loaded, less one round now, and tore open a Velcro pouch on her IOTV, pulling out one of a few loose .50 BMG match rounds. She thumbed it into the magazine, then put the mag back in the rifle; rounds: seven plus one. "Okay. I know," she said as she did it. "And . . . yeah."

"Is the safety on?" Titus asked, looking uneasily at her anti-matérial rifle.

Knowing he was joking, Olivia pretended to be upset and said, "What are you trying to say, Titus?!" and they both laughed.

After that Titus said, "Everybody? Could you all come here for a second, please?" He spoke to everyone on the roof, with enough volume for them all to hear.

Over a few seconds he arranged them all into a circle. "Can everyone put one hand into the middle of us now? Like this?" Titus said, doing it.

Everybody put their hands in.

"Okay. Now, everybody put your hands over one another's?—" he was saying, moving a few of their hands to illustrate.

"Great," he said.

Everyone joined in; Sunny tried to get Cheyenne to put a paw on the pile too, but the dog didn't want to and kept pulling her paw back. "Come on, Cheyenne!" Sunny said.

Smiling Titus went on, "Now we're gonna say 'Go team!' at the same time, and sorta throw our hands into the air. It's a teamwork-team spirit thing. Everybody ready?"

"I think so," Sunny said.

Olivia was smiling. She got it.

Trudy said "Okay" and noticed Ringo, across the small alley on the top of Chet's Goodsprings General Store, watching them, looking forlorn.

"I'll start it," Titus said, "but everybody say this along with me: Gooo . . . team!" Everyone joined in with him, at varying times, even Raúl and Trudy, whom Titus didn't think would participate. "Yeah!" Titus said, enthusiastically but joking.

"Yeah!" Olivia said with this big smile.

"Yeah!" Cass said.

Then he got moving.

To say goodbye for now on your dangerous endeavor, Olivia set her heavy rifle down, its 700mm (27.5") long barrel pointing into the sky, up against the edge of the roof, and she turned to Titus and gave him a big kiss on the cheek, which he returned, and a big, too-tight hug, which he also returned.

She stood very close to him and held him tightly, catching him completely by surprise when she said, "I love you," squeezing him. She meant it. She didn't let her emotions into the open much. She was afraid.

"I love you too," Titus said, not hesitating, squeezing her back. He meant it. He put one of his hands on her head, at the side. She leaned into it with her eyes closed. They'd never said I love you to each other before.

Her eyes opened, she looked at him, and she kissed him on the cheek again. On the way in she moved slowly, at first in the direction of his lips, just for two seconds. He thought it was about to become entirely another kind of kiss. But it didn't. Her lips smacked softly wetly against his cheek. It still felt really nice, especially with everything he knew was behind it.

"Don't do anything stupid," Olivia said. "Don't get yourself hurt." Her voice sounded a little thick, heavy. Titus was in such disbelief that he couldn't comprehend what it meant. And she was vulnerable. He'd seen her like that maybe twice before. He didn't know how to respond. He just let himself be vulnerable too, direct and honest and truthful. He didn't know what else he could do.

"I won't," he said. "You be careful too, okay? And if anything goes wrong, just kill all the Powder Gangers yourself." There wouldn't be many of them. Olivia likely wouldn't even have to reload, unless she missed. One .50 Browning Machine Gun round was enough to kill a human and then some. With other cartridges hits that would only be grazes often became, with .50 BMG, severed limbs. Most cartridges were lighter than .50 BMG, a bullet half an inch wide that could make human beings explode, put head-sized holes in cinderblocks, and shoot through schools.

"Okay," Olivia said.

"You've got your helmet, right?" Titus asked.

It was clipped to her IOTV. "Uh-huh," she said. She patted it. She should've patted him instead. She took one of his hands in hers. Her voice had evened out. Maybe he hadn't heard it, before. Her hand was a little sweaty. His was nice and warm and calm. "Will you wear yours for me?" she asked. "When you get out of the Black Hawk? So you don't bump your head?" He gripped her hand. She squeezed back, rubbing him with her thumb. Titus kept thinking as she spoke that she was done speaking with each additional question. She was self-conscious and grinning by the end.

"Yes, yes, yes," he said, smiling along with her, and hugged her again, still holding her hand.

She watched him climb down the ladder, run to his huge magical helicopter, get in, sit in the pilot's seat and put on his flight helmet, power up and flip switches, then lift off, turn around and fade away into the sky.

Olivia was talking to Cass and Raúl, then noticed something seemed to be bothering Sunny.

"Are you doing okay, Sunny?" Olivia asked.

Sunny was quiet for a second, then said, "Yeah, I'm okay."

Olivia watched Sunny, concerned, then changed the topic. "Hey Sunny?" she said. "Incase any of those really big radscorpions ever come into town, can I give you a higher-caliber rifle, or something?"

"Sure, if you want to," Sunny said.

"Okay," Olivia said. Then she put her headset back on and hailed Titus over the radio. She said: "You let me know how it's going while you're doing it, okay? Over."

"Wilco," Titus came back with. He felt very far away. "You'll hear me talking to the Boomers. But yeah, sure I will. You might miss it when the Boomers pick up that Cobb is moving, so I'll make sure to tell you when they do. Over."

"Have he and his guys moved at all?" Olivia asked. "Over."

"No, he's just loitering. They appear to be circle-jerking," Titus said. "I didn't know people actually did that. Over."

"Are they really? Do any of 'em have big dicks? Over," Olivia said. She was laughing.

Trudy asked her, "What're you laughin' at?"

Cass said, "What was that about dicks?"

Olivia said, "Titus said the Powder Gangers're jerkin' each other off!"

Trudy looked confused. Cass laughed. Sunny snickered.

"No, they're not really doing that," Titus came back over the radio disappointingly. "I'll call back when I have something to tell you, okay? Over."

"Ah, damn, he said they weren't actually doing that," Olivia said not over the radio, then replied to Titus, "Okay. I just like talking to you. Over."

"I like talking to you too. I'm just flying a complicated piece of advanced tech and I need to focus. Sorry. Over and out," Titus said. Then it felt like he was worlds away.

Titus felt guilty, but if he wasn't careful he'd crash the helicopter, flying alone. Thinking about Olivia was too much. And he could keep talking to her; During the run he'd have plenty of down time he could put to good use.

The Boomers were on the same frequency. He addressed them, though Olivia would hear too, and checked in with them incase anything had changed. Olivia listened in, but it was a little jargoney. They were tracking a lot of Powder Gangers; no movement yet. They were all just milling about in their campsites, drinking and smoking and apparently not having any forms of sex. He asked one drone crew to look around some more incase they'd missed anyone, and to double-check that the one they'd identified as Joe Cobb was Joe Cobb, to which the Boomers in good humor said they already were and had but would do it again anyway. Everything was going fairly well.


	6. V

**V**

_Remainder — Status Affect — Caps Reward — Insecurity — Trauma Bag — At the Doc's — Lights — Med-X — At the Saloon — Loot —Combat Veteran — Long Range — Vittles — Strength — FRO_

"That went well," Sunny said to Olivia, who was still looking all around scanning for targets, eager to fire her Hécate 2 some more. Sunny's ears were still ringing, though she felt the vibrations in her jaw of herself speaking.

It took Olivia a second to catch up with Sunny; Olivia was upset with herself; She'd missed at least once, though she'd made some pretty good hits, too. "Oh. Yeah," she said to Sunny.

Olivia climbed off the crates she'd been standing on. Sometimes it was awkward moving with her heavy anti-matérial rifle.

Olivia turned a full circle, checking her PIP-Boy's IFF. She had the same kind of PIP-Boy Titus did, though she hadn't tinkered with it, and didn't really want to; she wasn't as good with complicated machines and computers and science stuff as him; so hers didn't work quite as well; hers wasn't "custom," as she liked to describe his. On the IFF dial she didn't see any red marks around her, though there was a lot of yellow.

"I guess we're good," she said, then remembered and said, "Can I have my radio back, please?"

"Sure," Sunny said, pulled it out of her pocket and handed it over. "I kinda liked using that thing."

"I could tell," Olivia said.

Titus picked up his two big .338 Lapua Magnum casings for reloading, pocketed them, set the SRS down to slip back on his armored vest, then noticed he was still wearing the 5.11 tac vest and its attached web belt, as well as the damn additional backpack and radio in it, so he took both of those off, then decided hell with it and dropped everything, then put the big portable radio back on to talk with the Boomers, and went around the roof checking with everybody and looking for visible wounds. After a quick round of updates with the Boomers, he checked on Trudy first because she was closest and not doing anything. It later occurred to him that he should've gone to Olivia first.

"You hit?" he asked her.

"Oh, no. Thanks for askin', honey," Trudy said. She was holding a Winchester M1897 in both hands. Her weapon used to be what people called a "single shotgun," an ancient single-action single-shot break-open shotgun with only one chamber and barrel—one shot at a time—in 20-gauge common in the Mojave region. Titus had given her a Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge, designed by John Moses Browning, the first successful pump-action shotgun. Titus also gave her a lot of ammo for it. The M1897 had been used in World War I, where it gained nicknames like Trench Gun and Trench Sweeper, then WWII. No guns had been used in World War III, normally called the Great War; only nuclear missiles, big ones. Trudy's M1897 was a Trench model with a steel heat shield that looked like Swiss cheese, sling swivels and a bayonet lug. It looked old but vicious. Rowdy drunk traders and their guards didn't like their chances arguing with it, and people didn't try to talk their way out of paying for drinks much anymore.

"I have a sidepack of stimpacks burning a hole in my pocket," Titus told her. She smiled. She liked him. "I'm gonna go check in with everybody. If anybody's hurt send 'em to me."

"Okay," she said, and checked him out as he walked away.

Raúl was next closest. He was enjoying looking at his S&amp;W M29. He looked good. Titus asked if he'd been hit or anything. Raúl said he was just fine.

Titus moved on.

"How are you feeling, Cheyenne?" he asked the dog as he came up to her and Sunny, and knelt to check the dog for injuries and pet her. He might've been spoiling her a little but she didn't get much affection.

She was fine. She leaned into him to get him to push his knuckles down along her back and spine. She was dirty, a lot of her fur matted. She hadn't had a bath lately.

"Hey, Titus," Sunny said. She sounded stressed. Titus looked up, concerned, but she looked completely fine, no clothing torn, no bleeding. She was a little sweaty. She was wiping off her forehead with a rag. Titus stood. "Thanks for helping us," she said. "You didn't have to do that."

"You're welcome," he said. "I know my plan was sorta crazy. I just wanted to do it in a way that wouldn't get any of you guys hurt. Now I'm gonna find out if it worked."

He looked at her. "You got a graze," he said, pointing at her face and reaching for his gear, then realizing it was at the back of the roof, not the front. On the left side of Sunny's face just above the cheekbone was a thin red line going upward. A small trickle of blood had run down less than a half inch. Sunny was a little plain but cute, with brown hair that looked red pulled back in a tight ponytail and a light dusting of freckles around her nose and strappy tight leather armor with American football shoulder pads. Oddly fashionable, leather armor.

"A graze?" Sunny said. She didn't feel it.

"Probably a bullet, though it could be a bit of wood," Titus said. "I suspect nine-millimeter. I'm gonna take care of it, okay?"

Sunny just looked at him. She seemed confused.

He went to where on the roof he'd set his SRS, armored vest, tac vest and rucksack and took from the rucksack a bandanna, a bottle of purified water and his trauma bag, from which he dug out an antiseptic.

He told her what he was going to do then did it, and took care of her minuscule wound in a few seconds, or as Sunny put it, in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

Before putting his stuff back in his bag he said to Sunny, "I have a mirror in my armor. Do you wanna see your battle wound?" He was clearly kidding but said it as if he were serious. Sometimes his sense of humor was dry like that.

Sunny giggled and said sure. She had a dry sense of humor.

Titus put his things away quickly and came back with a mirror that fit in his hand. He usually forgot he had it. He held it up for Sunny to take. She took it.

"Have you been in a fight like that before?" Titus asked her.

Looking at herself in the mirror and turning her head, then looking to Titus, then back to the mirror, she said, "Not really. I got scared."

"I saw you. You did fine," Titus said. "It can be kinda scary. It's good that you were up here; you had cover. I guess this roof can take a bullet."

"Yeah," Sunny said. "Without your idea we would've all just been out on the street." She handed the mirror back to Titus and gestured at her bullet graze: "This doesn't look like much. You took a lot of risk with those radscorpions." She spoke without a tone, but her choice of words seemed like both rebuke and thanks.

"I'm a lot faster than them," Titus said. "It sounds risky but it wasn't really. I'm sorry, it prob'ly seemed like I was trying to be cool or something. I wasn't. I said this to Trudy: I only did it cuz this didn't put you guys at as much risk. And I wanted to try it. I was afraid some of you would get killed. You still got shot at."

"Not very much," Sunny said. "You got here right after Cobb and them started shooting."

"That's good," Titus said.

"Titus," Sunny said, with this look.

"Yeah," he said, making sure he was actually listening and hearing her.

"That was . . . " Sunny began. "Olivia really likes you. The thing with the radscorpions made her really nervous."

Titus's expression softened. He felt overwhelmed with emotion, and confirmation of something he'd been denying himself, and conflicting feelings and fear and pulled in different directions and unsure. He looked away from Sunny for a second, then back to her warm but unwavering gaze. "Thanks," he said. "I probably seem indecisive. I just . . . want to do it the right way, if that makes sense. For the right reasons. I'm worried I'll say the wrong thing. Or that . . . we won't be in the same place, or something."

"I understand," Sunny said. "Just don't hurt her."

"I won't," Titus said. He looked directly at Sunny so she would know.

She looked into his eyes examining him.

Two or maybe five seconds later—it felt like an awfully long time—she smiled and hugged him, hard, breaking eye contact. He hugged back but was thinking too much about Olivia to feel it. "You guys are so good together," Sunny said. "Even if you're a little too into guns." They were both smiling.

"That's more her than me," he said.

"She told me the legend of your SRS," Sunny said, smiling, "enough times I remember it's called an 'SRS.' Does that stand for something?"

"I just did my research," Titus said, flattered and smiling, the sight of which melted both Sunny's heart and something else in her, kind of between the legs. Her eyes dilated. "It means Stealth Recon Scout. It's a really good long-range weapon," Titus said, almost not noticing autonomic Sunny's physical reaction. "And not big or heavy or whatever. I used to use a Hécate 2 like she does, and some other light fifties. I might want to go with something lighter like .300 Win Mag."

"Is that what her rifle's called? That big damn thing?" Sunny said, just a little breathy. "Hécate." She tasted the word.

"Yeah," Titus said. "It _was_ made by this French company; it's a French gun; but the Gun Runners make them now. I dunno how they got the schematics, or why they'd choose that. Because it looks sorta rustic, I guess. It weighs 34.8 pounds."

"Jesus Christo," Sunny said, "Christ-O." It's "Kreestoh;" It sounded odd in her hard flat American English accent, though she pronounced J like H correctly in "Jesus." Titus wondered if Sunny was Hispanic, in part or otherwise. She was light-skinned. Maybe mestizo? Sunny said, "She must be stronger than she looks."

"She is," Titus said, proud that Olivia was strong now. She could bench almost 150 pounds. "We work out together, and do some weight training almost every day."

"Wow," Sunny said, mostly lost in thought about Titus couldn't tell what. Then she smiled, shaking her head. He smiled too. She hugged him again. "You make her happy," Sunny said quietly. It wasn't an imperative; she was telling him the effect he had.

"I just . . . hope I can keep her interested. Like, never forget why we got together. Do you know what I mean?" Titus said.

"I kind of do," Sunny said.

"I better go check with her," Titus said. "If you hug me again she's gonna think I have designs on you."

"Sorry," Sunny said.

"It's fine," Titus said, touching her arm as he stepped away.

"Titus!" Sunny called. He looked back. She pointed at her cheek and said, "Thanks for taking care of me," possibly blushing just a little, with a big smile on her face.

"You're welcome," he said.

As Titus made his way to Olivia, a flying ED-E ran into his head. He didn't have his helmet on; It hurt a little. Nobody seemed to see it happen, though.

"Did you do that on purpose, Eddie?" Titus asked it.

ED-E trilled.

"If you say so," Titus said. "Did you get shot at all?"

ED-E said "a little," but not in English. It was wobbling a little, hovering unevenly. Titus heard something loose inside of it.

"Want a stimpack?" Titus asked it.

"What would I do with a stimpack?" ED-E said.

Titus shrugged.

Titus sat on the roof, cradled ED-E, shut down most of its routines and processes and hardware, including the flying suite, took a hex key from a vest pocket and opened one of the eyebot's rear panels. A deformed, probably FMJ 9x19mm round rolled out when Titus started rotating ED-E's chassis. It was too wide and too short to be 5.56x45mm. "Ah," Titus vocalized, picking it up. The bullet had cooled down. ED-E tweeted. "Nine millimeter," Titus said, and showed ED-E. ED-E blooped. They both laughed.

When he reached Olivia, who was talking to Cass, who was drinking something hard, he checked Olivia out, and also looked for visible wounds. He saw none. She was sweating but looked fine. She was wearing her armor, though she'd taken off the helmet, as far as he knew after the radscorpions were all dead. He wasn't too worried about her, but there was always a chance of something going tits up.

"Either of you get hit?" Titus asked them.

"Not a once," Olivia said. "Thanks for asking."

"I'm good too, thanks," Cass said. She was smiling. "Did _you_ get hit, you crazy bastard? I saw when you ran through them Powder Gangers. I thought any of 'em was about to drop you."

Titus said, "I seemed to catch them rather by surprise." He hadn't meant to be funny but Olivia laughed, then Cass did too, looking at Olivia. "I don't think they even shot at me. So neither of you got hit? I have a shitload of stimpacks on me."

Cass smiled drunkenly. Olivia grinned and gazed at him with this look in her eye.

"They hardly got any shots off," Olivia said, but it wasn't what she was thinking about. She looked down at the floor of the roof. "Could you help me gather my shells please Titus?"

He considered it, then said "Sure" and did. She'd emptied her magazine plus one. The two of them found all eight of her empties easily. She mostly watched him doing it. Three shells Titus retrieved were hot, but the others had cooled off. She put the salt shaker-size .50 cal casings in her ACU pants' cargo pocket, the one without a holster strapped down over it, put her empty magazine in a vest pouch and swapped it out for a new one, but for safety's sake didn't automatically chamber a round this time.

Titus put on his armored vest and radio, clipped the tac vest on his back via one of the MMAC's shoulders with one of many rock climbing carabiners he'd brought. He kept climbing kits in the helicopter incase of fun or emergency. He also put on the MOLLE II rucksack, then strapped the SRS to his back to go down the ladder to the ground. "We ready?" he asked Olivia. He probably looked kind of stupid with so much stuff on him. At least Viana still had his HK417. That would've been nine more pounds of bulk and awkward, and he didn't trust either ladder.

"Yep," Olivia said.

"Okay; everybody," Titus said to their followers, "let's head back down. You too, Rex!"

Rex barked and got in line.

Titus went down after everyone else. While he waited, he radioed the Boomer UCAV teams and checked in with them; they hadn't located any more radscorpions or other critters menacing the town, and they didn't see any other Powder Gangers heading toward Goodsprings. He asked them if they would stay on station for about 5 more minutes, incase anything came up, to which they said they loved the practice and would've been happy to stay in the area for another hour or two, easy.

The trip down the ladder was uncomfortable for him but went fine.

Sunny, Trudy and another Goodspringer started moving back down the crates and barrels they'd moved up to the roof to stand on. Once they noticed, Olivia and Titus helped take down the rest of them.

Titus decided to check in with everybody else in town to make sure they were okay. He hoped they'd stayed behind cover, but at least a few of them had tried fighting radscorpions. Olivia wanted to just leave, but went along with it.

Before they could leave the saloon's area Ringo walked up to Titus and Olivia, with a small burlap sack in his hand. They didn't know where he'd got it from. His timing was inconvenient.

Looking between the two of them Ringo said, "Thanks. I owe you a huge favor for this. Here—" he said handing the bag to Titus, "these are technically Crimson Caravan funds, but . . . I know they'll understand once I explain things." The bag jingled of caps when Ringo handed it over.

Feeling a little more famous, Olivia said, "Okay." Titus handed her the bag. He didn't seem to care about money. He didn't say they'd split it 50/50. She pulled its drawstrings open: There were a lot of bottlecaps in the bag; it looked like more than 50, maybe 80 or a hundred. Not 200; it didn't weigh that much. Once again Olivia felt stupid for condoning that the currency for most people in the wasteland was not direct barter but rather soda pop bottle caps. Titus felt similarly without being bothered by it. The NCR and the Legion also used their own currencies, paper money in the NCR and coins in Legion territory. And each of the working casinos on the Strip had their own chips. Before the war they apparently all had.

"You're welcome," Titus said.

Unasked, Ringo offered further, "Yeah, I'll stick around here for a bit longer, but I'll be gone in a few days." Titus and Olivia independently suspected he wouldn't be. Ringo went on, "If you ever visit New Vegas, look me up at the Crimson Caravan camp."

"Whatever, man," Olivia said.

Titus, insecure, had worried upon meeting Ringo that Olivia might go for the handsome guy instead of himself, or just fuck Ringo or something, which Titus wouldn't have liked either, but since Ringo had introduced himself by pointing a gun at Olivia, she hadn't so much as looked in Ringo's direction kindly. She looked like she wanted to kill him, whatever his relationship with Sunny might've been. Titus had seen Olivia look at quite a few other people the same way before killing them. Ringo had also totally creeped her out just before Titus left to round up radscorpions. Olivia especially hated threats, people pointing guns at her, and rudeness. Titus mostly only hated bad logic, formal or informal, animal cruelty and sexual abuse. And sometimes gender and sexuality politics. Titus still felt threatened by Ringo, like he'd lose Olivia's friendship, and that tore him up inside badly, but he tried not to let it bother him. He tried to think about anything else. He thought about running, playing with dogs and crying alone. _Whoops! Dogs!_ he thought. _Just let go_, he told himself. _Let it go. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion._

Titus was about to say something nice to Ringo, but then Ringo abruptly wandered off toward the saloon. He walked with a limp.

The other five Goodspringers there—less Doc Mitchell and Chet—were armed poorly for fighting gigantic scorpions, but fairly well for Powder Gangers.

Titus'd had Chet dole out leather armor to all of them, he thought, but one was still wearing this rustic but nice field hand outfit, a long striped red dress with short sleeves and an apron over it. She was a pretty blonde with a short pixie haircut armed only with a steel cooking knife, which embarrassed Titus, who would've given her something better, even one of the weapons in his helicopter or his backup sidearm, a .40 S&amp;W HK P30S, if he'd known all she had was a cheap mass-produced dull knife.

Two of the other four Goodspringers had ancient firearms: an anonymous unmarked long double-barreled 10-gauge shotgun, and a rusty Colt Single Action Army in .45 Colt, also called .45 Long Colt. Another had a varmint rifle in .22 Long Rifle that looked like it was from about 1952. The last one had a dull blackish grey modern carbon steel single-and-double-action revolver, and Titus asked them what it was. He could tell it was Smith &amp; Wesson, but not what model; They didn't know. They weren't entirely sure how to work it and had maybe never cleaned it. He examined it. On the side of the barrel it read "S&amp;W .357 MAGNUM." On the frame with the cylinder open it read "MOD 586." It had five rounds in its six-shooter cylinder, all of them fired. It had a 4" barrel. Some of the metal was rusty, like Sunny's varmint rifle, and the wood grip was damaged, missing pieces, and had old sticky duct tape wound around it.

Two of the Goodspringers were wounded, the one with the shotgun and the one with the varmint rifle, one worse than the other. They were both right-handed, like most people; everyone, really. One had taken a through-and-through of a small caliber in the left arm; knowing the Powder Gangers' and NCR's arsenal probably 9x19mm or .223/5.56x45mm, which had fortunately not hit bone to go on and deflect and bounce around inside, tearing up who knows what, like bullets were wont to do, called "terminal effects;" nor had it hit any arteries. Titus's pinky finger didn't quite fit in the hole. It was bleeding but not badly. The bullet was probably FMJ, to go straight through, which would make sense as that was the NCR's standard 5.56mm round. You rarely saw anything else, especially on Powder Gangers. Titus would deal with her second, but he couldn't do nothing now, so he quickly cleaned the wound, disinfected it and taped gauze down on both ends to stop the bleeding and keep out dust and other contaminants. The other Goodspringer was bleeding more heavily from a more solid hit to the left thigh, which was bad and could've been horrible, though the bullet hadn't hit anything important but muscle, apparently. Which was still bad.

"We don't need to take the bullet out, but I need to clean it and treat it," Titus told him. "Then I can give you a stimpack or two. We can't let it get infected, that's the main thing."

"You don't need to stitch it up or nothin'?" the Goodsprings settler asked, wincing from pain as he spoke. He'd been holding a filthy red rag over the entrance wound; there was no exit wound.

"No, the stimpack does that," Titus said, gesturing by making an open hand into a fist. "Closes it up. I can put this sealant thing down on the surface if you want me to."

"Is that stimpack one of them fancy future deals?" the man said.

"Yes it is," Titus said. "The word's a generic contraction of 'stimulant package.' I've also seen it written 'stimulant delivery package.' No, 'stimulation.' It's a pretty solid cocktail of a couple things, most importantly synthetic stem cells which accelerate natural regeneration by quite a lot. Steroids too. I don't know why I'm going on about this, sorry."

"That's okay," the man said.

"All right, thanks. This might be embarrassing, but I need to move you to a clean environment without aggravating your injury. So we're gonna go to Doc Mitchell's house," Titus said.

Not understanding what Titus meant, the man just started walking that way.

Titus stopped him. "Don't move. _I_ need to move you to Mitchell's house, okay?"

The man looked him over, panicking about something but only for a half-second. Titus was a big guy. To the man, Titus looked like he could carry him without dropping him.

"Okay," the man said, compliant. His face was a little pale. His pants were shiny with blood down the front of the left leg. Titus suspected there was a large blood splatter or maybe a pool of it somewhere, wherever he'd been shot.

"We don't have a stretcher—" Titus was saying.

"It's right there," the man interrupted, pointing at Mitchell's house maybe 40 yards away.

"I can't let you walk or you're gonna make the wound worse. You might rupture an artery," Titus said. The man didn't know what that was but it sounded bad. "So I'm just gonna carry you. Understand?"

He understood but still looked confused.

Titus picked him up in a fireman carry, careful but assertive. Titus was made a little awkward by all the things hanging off him, but the gear and the fully grown man didn't slow him down. Nobody offered to carry anything for Titus, but he hadn't expected them to. Sometimes he missed the South.

For a smooth ride Titus walked rather than jogged.

"Olivia, could you get the door for me please?" Titus asked her in front of Doc Mitchell's house as he went through the open gate of the picket fence around it.

"Sure," she said and went up first and knocked on the door, but no one answered it after a few restless seconds, so she opened it.

As Titus stepped into the house, still carrying an adult male in addition to a lot of gear, he called out to Doc Mitchell, who didn't answer; He continued not to answer until Titus went right up to him in his kitchen.

"Hi, Titus," Mitchell said. "Is that a person you're carrying?"

"One of your townsfolk," Titus said, "Yeah. Do you remember that thing with the Powder Gangers I asked you about earlier?"

"Yes," Mitchell said.

"Did you hear the gunfire a minute ago?"

" . . . Yes."

"He got hit," Titus said, gesturing.

"I see," Mitchell said, looking at the streak of dark wet on the leather pants of the inverted man Titus was carrying.

"May I use your operating table?" Titus said, feeling a mite impatient.

"Yeah, sure," Mitchell said and took a slow bite of bran cereal.

"Thank you," Titus said.

He went back to the clinic area of the house, set the man on the main operating table by the left wall and the man groaned, then Titus set down his long gun and tac vest and manpack radio and armored vest and rucksack against the back wall in one of many open spaces, which took him a few seconds, then he looked around and noticed a lot of people in the room watching him—a Goodsprings settler he didn't know, Olivia, Cass, Raul, Rex, ED-E, Sunny Smiles, Cheyenne and even Ringo. The dogs were sniffing each other. Viana was probably at the saloon playing cards. The room was crowded. Titus felt self-conscious but tried to ignore it. "Hey, Ringo," he said.

"Hey Titus," Ringo said, smiling.

Titus flipped the main operating light on. It worked and came on brightly after two seconds. In Mitchell's rather dark dusty house the contrast between lit and unlit was striking. Titus had to squint and let himself get used to it. He briefly wondered where the machine's power came from, and where the Vigor-Tester's power came from. There were also several wall lights, all on, in the house.

"I needed to get you to a clean environment," Titus said to the man lying on the table, pulling his trauma bag out from his rucksack and taking out blue sterile nitrile rubber gloves for each hand. "I'm sorry it took a minute," Titus went on. "But if I just did it outside it might've been bad. Irradiated dust could blow into the wound and kill you. Or anything could happen. I'm sorry, I'm talking too much." The man didn't seem to mind it.

Titus went to his trauma bag, gathered things and came back with a syringe; a small-gauge hypodermic needle; a small round bottle, clear with a printed label and a rubber top on the cap; then after thinking for a second also a handful of tourniquets, a big maroon bottle of rubbing alcohol and some cotton balls. He screwed the needle into the syringe. Then he said, "This is morphine," of the small round bottle. "It's an opioid and analgesic. Painkiller. It's gonna make you feel good. You'll probably feel me poking around but it won't hurt. I'll give you 10 milligrams. It'll last four hours. I'll need about two minutes. I just need you to stay still, okay?"

"Okay," the man said. He was eerily subdued and clearly in pain but submitting.

Titus applied a tourniquet, a stretchy rubber tube, tying it to the man's upper arm, then got rubbing alcohol on one cotton ball and rubbed it over a big spot on the inside of the man's elbow, making the skin seem greenish yellow. "Make a fist," Titus said to the man, who did it right on the first try with an expression like "Is this right?" Titus tapped on the man's elbow with two fingers together a couple times; he had good veins; and slipped the needle through skin into a vein and injected him, then took the tourniquet off. _Damn, I need to get a Band-Aid_, he thought. Titus set the needle and syringe and tourniquet aside on a tray on the top of a wheeled metal cart Doc Mitchell kept within convenient arm's reach of the operating table.

"A lot of people call it Med-X, which I think is stupid, but what're ya gonna do," Titus said to the man. "I'm gonna set up to clean your wound." He looked at his PIP-Boy and pressed a button then flipped and cycled to its atomic clock, in the Data section, and waited five more seconds. "You should already be feeling that," he said. "Do you feel different at all?"

" . . . I don't feel anything," the man said.

"Good! It's working," Titus said. "Am I gonna need to tie you down to keep you still?"

"I don't think so," the man said.

"Alrighty then," Titus said. "Just stay right there, okay?"

"Sounds good," the man said lightly.

There were generic medical bandages with gauze in the middle and sticky ends on Mitchell's wheeled convenience cart. Titus took one stuck it over the injection site.

Titus got ready the next things he'd need.

With an obsidian scalpel Titus always kept about his person he easily cut the man's leather pants off of the wounded leg, which was a little pale and bloody and sweaty. The filthy grey boxer shorts the man had on under the pants were short enough that all Titus needed to do to get them out of the way was push them up the leg a little. Titus applied a tourniquet above the wound and elevated the leg.

"I don't think the bullet hit anything important. That's lucky," Titus said. "I guess. Just so you know, I don't have the tools on me to take it out. The bullet. We'd need to go to the New Vegas Medical Clinic or maybe the Followers' headquarters, that old Mormon fort, or this lab place I kinda live at. If you want to do that in the future just let me know. I should buy you some pants too. You need X-ray to do it right. Controlled X-ray machines, I mean, not just setting off a nuclear device next to you." The man smiled at that with a look like he would've laughed if he weren't high. Titus went on, "It's also a difficult operation. We can't know how much exactly you've been moving around since you got shot, thus the location of the bullet's probably changed too. It might've gone up or down by inches. We'd have to find it. And anyway the tissue naturally clenches and heals up around the bullet even though it's a foreign object, so by rooting around in there lookin' for it we might make the wound worse, or make some whole new wounds. Any of which could result in heavy bleeding. It's sensitive, y'see. We don't really need to take the bullet out, though. Fortunately. The stimpack will take care of it. That and your body's natural healing. If you lost a lot of blood you might want to transfuse some more in with Doc Mitchell, but I think you're okay. Try not to run or do much heavy lifting in the next few days, okay?"

"Okay," the man said.

"Did you bleed an awful lot?" Titus asked.

"I don't know," the man said.

"What's your name?" Titus said.

"Arturo," the man said.

Titus administered a stimpack, injecting it by the entrance wound, put its empty syringe on the tray, and dressed and bandaged the wound while it got to work.

Titus cleaned his hands and bagged up his used equipment and put his trauma bag away in his rucksack, and went to Doc Mitchell to say thanks.

"Good job, Titus," Mitchell said.

"Were you watching too?" Titus asked.

"No," Mitchell said. "I just know you would've done a good job. It's mighty white of you to patch up a common citizen."

"You might need to give him some blood," Titus said. "I didn't think to blood-type him. Anyway, thank you for the compliment," he said, smiling. Mitchell patted him on the arm. "Oh," he said, "I was gonna go put him in the saloon and buy him a drink. Is that okay, for treatment? I'm not sure about drug interaction—"

Mitchell said, "Should be fine."

Titus said, "Okay then."

Titus told the injured Goodspringer, Arturo, the plan, picked him up again gently, left his own gear in Mitchell's house and carried Arturo to the Prospector Saloon, which Olivia among others noticed seemed to be about as taxing a physical activity for Titus as carrying a rag doll.

She also noticed that a few Goodspringers were working to clean the mess of gore south of the saloon where radscorpion had hit Powder Ganger, as well as another person or two dragging smaller radscorpion bodies out of other places in the town. She mentally noted to help them clean up after this bit was done.

Before reaching the saloon Titus noticed the same thing and paused and turned around to address the crowd behind him—Olivia, Cass, Raúl, Rex, ED-E, Sunny and Cheyenne. He let them know what he was doing incase they hadn't heard before then said, "I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were following me. I was focused. You guys just do whatever you like, okay? Including help clean up the town. I'm gonna set this fella down, get him a drink and then go pick up my stuff from Doc Mitchell's. Then I'll help clean out the bodies too."

Titus found the other injured Goodspringer, whom he'd slightly forgotten about, in the saloon. She seemed to have forgotten she'd been injured. The bleeding had stopped. She was fine, except she had a hole in her left arm, and some blood on her clothes and one sleeve was gone, which looked trashy. He'd done a good job on her before. He'd need to buy her new clothes. He should take her to the Strip and get her something that would last, something good, from one of the clothing shops or tailors he knew, but not so good as to be ostentatious or impractical for country desert living; He offered to do that as he worked on her. She called herself a country girl, and didn't believe him. He told her to tell him when she wanted to go. She could call him over the long-range radio he'd put in Trudy's saloon; there was a list of a few frequencies, including his sort of home one at the Lucky 38.

Titus changed the bandage and injected a stimpack to heal the wound. She thanked him. He bought her a drink. She hugged him with one arm and thanked him for helping them all. He said she was welcome and he was really sorry she got shot. She said she'd never been shot before but hadn't even noticed it happening. He said he didn't believe her. She laughed and said it was true. He still didn't believe her.

Viana had been in the saloon, playing caravan for low stakes with Trudy. Both were good caravan players. Viana had a better deck from her time in the service, but Trudy won more games than her.

For a minute or two Olivia stood outside the front of the Prospector Saloon, partially enjoying the sight of it—she'd always loved its façade—and partially inspecting the damage to it. The Powder Gangers hadn't got very many shots in before Titus reached them with the radscorpions, but at the time it'd felt like they got hundreds of shots off. Olivia could only count nine or maybe 11 new holes and nicks on the saloon's front side, most of them on the tall façade where the normal lettering of "Prospector" and the janky mixed media neon of "Saloon" of its name were. A few holes and nicks were deep, and some were shallow. The lower, smaller neon "OPEN 24 HOURS" sign at eye level was untouched. A few of the saloon's lovely, sparkly multi-colored Christmas lights had been shot out. That bothered Olivia. Both strings of lights were still lit, though. She loved the look of the lights. She wanted to put some Christmas lights up in her home with Titus, maybe in the main entrance of the casino and then in their 22nd floor presidential suite. Whatever Christmas was, she liked it.

Olivia had their followers start helping clean up the town, except Rex and ED-E who couldn't carry bodies. The other Goodspringer followed Titus with Arturo into the saloon. Sunny decided to get a drink of water with them.

After selling Titus a bottle of Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit bourbon whiskey and a Nuka-Cola for Arturo, which Titus did a serviceable job of mixing by himself, Trudy asked Titus, "What should we do with the Powder Gangers' bodies?"

As it happened Titus had been thinking about that. He said, "I'll take care of them. If you _want_ to do anything with them just put 'em in like a centralized body pile."

Titus gave Arturo the bourbon and cola, said, "Don't get drunk, okay? This'll be your only drink for about six hours," to which Arturo said "Okay," then Titus went to Mitchell's and came back out with all his gear.

He set most of his stuff down in one of two very rusty dumpsters by Chet's general store, for the moment. He meant to get his HK417A2 back from Viana, too—he was still wearing its empty sling and felt half a fool for it.

He looked around for Olivia, first finding ED-E, whom she had told to stay with him. He patted ED-E on the side and looked for his various party members.

Olivia was in the Powder Ganger massacre area—a huge smear of spilled blood, bodies and dismembered parts of bodies and bits of brain and tissue—dragging one of the Powder Gangers.

"I got them to agree that I get first dibs on their gear and stuff," Olivia immediately began saying, as Titus came up to her, about loot, "but the other people from Goodsprings—actually just this one named Toni—have already looked them over for valuables."

"Okay," he said. "Did they _have_ any valuables?"

"Couple'a rings, some jewelry," Olivia said.

"Did she check 'em for money?" Titus said.

"No," Olivia said. "Well, for bottlecaps yes. She said some of 'em had NCR money, but she didn't want it."

"Do you mind if I take it? I do some business in the NCR," Titus said.

Appearing out of nowhere behind Titus, Cass gave his ass a quick possessive tight spank as she said, "Think you're hot shit, Titus?" joking—and making him flinch, and reflexively start to draw his sidearm to shoot her, and reaching his other arm out to grab her and control her body; He didn't mind her touching him but it was dangerous to surprise someone who'd been in combat like that, worse to do it to someone who'd been in a lot of combat, even if they were unarmed, and especially if they'd been trained exhaustively for years and years in different forms of hand-to-hand combat and martial arts, like Titus had, or happened to have various guns and mêlée weapons within arm's reach, like he also did. Luckily, those instincts didn't take hold of him. He never grabbed her, and his fingers only briefly grazed his Glock 22C's handle. He must've given Cass some kind of _look_, though, because a second later she gave him a look back, as if what she'd done were his fault, and trying to make him feel bad. Cass was manipulative like that sometimes. It didn't entirely work.

"Be careful about sneaking up on me, okay?" he said to her. He should've heard her coming.

Cass looked to Olivia for support and got none. Olivia spoke. Titus looked to Olivia to listen; she had this "You done _fucked_ up now, Cass" look on her face. Olivia had snuck up on Titus a couple of times successfully and his reactions hadn't all been cutesy. Sometimes Olivia forgot about all the combat and horrible violence he'd experienced—it was easy to forget—not really knowing anything about it herself, despite a few years' NCR military service of her own. She'd never seen any action. She'd been a quartermaster, and not in the Mojave region. Not what she wanted, but she got to play with guns all day. She said what Titus had been thinking: "Bad idea, Cass. I'm not saying I'm not a little excited to see him get spanked, though."

Olivia wondered about Titus. He'd told her he hadn't been in the NCR military, but he'd clearly had military training, and much more of it than her. Martial arts, too, not just guns and a little physical training and drills like she got. He was some kind of qualified sniper or something, and assaulter—it was pretty amazing to see him storm a room, or a building—special operations. Most impressively to her he could make shots, even on moving targets, from a much longer range than even Craig Boone, formerly of the NCR's elite First Recon scout/sniper battalion—really only a squad—could, hundreds and hundreds of yards away; she'd actually seen him do it loads of times; a few times at even more than a mile, according to their rangefinder lasers, which was hard to believe. But he'd done it. Slack-jawed, she'd watched it happen. With wind and without; Up or down elevation, and at even levels. At ranges of more than a few hundred yards, the bullet took quite a while to reach the target, which itself had a lot of time to move after Titus fired, though she wasn't sure if he ever missed. She figured the targets got hit before they heard the shot because the bullets Titus used for such ranges were supersonic. She couldn't imagine how he possibly calculated leading targets, and windage and trajectory and parallax and stuff like that. She'd never seen him make a range card, or whatever they were called, which she'd heard you were supposed to do, but then again they weren't military, and never stayed in the same position for long; hadn't been ordered to. Most of the time he just estimated distance by eye, and windage didn't make much difference to powerful, heavy long-range rounds with pretty straight trajectories like .338 Lapua Magnum or .50 BMG, the two she'd seen him use; sometimes he used another rifle in .50 called a Hard Target Interdiction (HTI).

"What're you talking about?" Cass said indignantly, bringing Olivia back to the present. Cass had been drinking. "I've snuck up on him before."

Olivia said, "And he didn't karate-chop you in the neck or something?"

"Well . . . " Cass said.

"It's just a reflex!" Titus said. "I'm sorry!"

Olivia looked scandalized as she began to say, "No, I'm just—" but then interrupted herself to say, "Oh, you were kidding, weren't you?"

He nodded and shrugged. "Kinda," he said. "I'm still sorry."

"It's still fine," Olivia said warmly. She smiled. Titus smiled back.

Titus looked to Cass and said, "I'm not saying don't touch my ass. I'm just saying, be careful."

"Okay," Cass said, but it sounded like "whatever."

"Oh, shit, I forgot why I came up to you," Titus said. "Olivia, may I buy you a drink?"

She looked touched. She unceremoniously dropped the Powder Ganger corpse she'd been dragging with a heavy dull thump and stood up straight, pushing her chest out—though as she was still wearing her IOTV it didn't have the intended effect—then cocked her hips a little to the side and put a hand on her hip, and said with her head inclined forward, "Yes you may, Titus sir." She looked alluring but absurd. He wasn't sure what she meant by the pose. They were both grinning.

Titus treated her and Cass to drinks and a snack and suggested they all help clean up the town afterward. They agreed. Titus told Arturo he couldn't help because of his injury. Arturo agreed. Arturo bought Titus a beer, a dark left-hand milk stout that was good and a little bitter, and Arturo's friend bought Titus crispy cooked squirrel bits on a stick which he didn't particularly want to eat and ate out of politeness.

Titus couldn't stop himself checking Olivia out even when she was sitting. She sat with her legs crossed at the knees, not the ankles.

ED-E, who was still following Titus but had been silent, agreed to help clean up too.

"What did he just say?" Olivia asked Titus of ED-E. Titus noticed the "he."

"It'll help too," Titus said.

ED-E bleeped, about Olivia.

"That's not nice, Eddie," Titus said, between swallowing and biting off cooked bits of squirrel. He wondered where Trudy's provider had found the squirrel. Titus had seen Mohave ground squirrels, but he didn't know anyone who hunted them, paid for their meat or otherwise acquired them. He'd only ever seen squirrels that he could remember in the states of Michigan, Ohio and Texas, and the country Japan, and when he'd been very young. He just hoped Trudy didn't get them through some form of factory farming.

"Was he talking about me?" Olivia said.

"No," Titus said and took another bite and a drink.

ED-E beeped. Titus looked at it, listening.

"What'd he say that time?" Olivia asked.

"That . . . That was nothing," Titus said.

"Was it calling me a drunk?" Cass said.

"No," Titus said, "but you might want to slow down a little."

"How much weight can he carry?" Olivia asked Titus of ED-E. She had an idea but not a number.

"I'm not sure," Titus said.

ED-E beeped and fizzled for a few seconds.

Titus translated: "It can lug around about 200 pounds—it can lift 260 pounds. It can push or drag 650 pounds."

"Wow," Olivia said.

"Pssht," Titus said.

"What? How much can _you_ push or drag?" Olivia asked, already kind of knowing.

"A lot more than that," Titus said. Olivia knew it was true.

"Bragger," Cass said. She smiled at Titus. He smiled too.

"I'm not bragging," Titus said. "I just don't want you two ladies to be more impressed by ED-E's carrying capacity or strength than mine."

"Doc Mitchell has that vigor tester machine thing," Olivia said. "Do you wanna go check it out?" she dared.

"To put all of you in your place, yes I do," Titus said to general laughter. They understood he was kidding. Probably. "But if we FRO'd to do that we'd be letting Goodsprings settlers clean up all the bodies for us. So, I propose we do the dick-measuring contest _after_ we clean up out there."

"What's 'F-R-O' mean?" Olivia asked.

"Fucked right off," Titus said. Olivia and some of their followers laughed. Cass didn't; she viscerally enjoyed hearing him say "fuck" then "off" in _that voice_ too much to laugh.

After the laughing calmed down Cass said, "I don't have a dick."

"That you know of," Titus said to more laughter.


	7. VI

**VI**

_Cleansing — Considerations — Spoils — Clothing — Venom Glands — Dropping Bodies — Balls_

Titus, Olivia and company cleaned up town along with several Goodspringers. After a while Viana felt guilty for not helping and joined in too. They used buckets of water, mops, sawdust and Abraxo powdered hand soap for blood. They found some shopping carts to help move the pieces of a lot of radscorpions and a few geckos littering the town.

Everybody had trouble moving the three giant radscorpions. Titus didn't, so he took care of them. One was all in one piece, but the other two had fragmented somewhat.

The various people helping with the effort just dragged the various sizes and types of creatures' bodies to the eastern side of town, wherever they happened to be on the north-south axis. As Titus was moving one of the giant radscorpions, he thought to move all the bodies further east, and into the empty but for wild plants desert areas east of town, where coyotes and other radscorpions and normal flies and geckos and ants would devour them over the next week or so. Flies, especially, had already been gathering.

Titus remembered about the two Reaper drones and the Boomers as he and the others were working, and retrieved his long-range radio and called the Boomers to tell them to fly the drones back to base. They happily complied, and updated him as they returned then landed them both. The landings went well. "Talk to you tomorrow, Titus," one of them said as they signed off.

After the initial time-consuming job of clearing out the town was done they all got together and drank outside the saloon. The smarter among them drank water. They talked about the main concerns: what to do with the Powder Gangers' bodies, as not everybody knew Titus already had an idea, and loot—and also how awesome they thought Titus's plan and his execution of it had been.

One person suggested they bury the bodies. One said leave them where they'd fallen and take their shit.

"Do you really mean that?" Titus asked her. "Some of them probably shit themselves when they died."

She thought about that then said, "I shoulda said 'valuables.' Take their valuables."

Titus recapped to them all what he'd gone over before with Olivia and Trudy. They agreed that Olivia and Titus would split the Powder Gangers' gear, weapons and ammo, of which there wasn't much. Titus would get their NCR paper money. The person who suggested only keeping their valuables who'd already searched them all for it, Toni, they agreed, could keep any bottlecaps and jewelry they had on them. Only Titus and Olivia wanted the clothes.

Titus explained his plan for disposal of the Powder Gangers' bodies: He'd be wrapping them in plastic and/or gecko hides, loading them in his helicopter, flying to the camp where they came from and dumping what was left of them there.

"So . . . why do you wanna dump them there?" Chet asked. He'd come out to generously offer everybody free bottles of water, then laughed and said he was just fucking with them, as Titus finished gathering everybody.

"We hafta put 'em somewhere," Titus said. "We're not gonna just leave them lying around town. They'll gather pests. It's also—it's there, I mean, also to send a message not to attack Goodsprings. Assuming any other Powder Gangers even knew what Joe Cobb and company were doing here. Which I doubt they did. I think he did that on his own. But if anybody _did_ know they'll give it some thought before attacking Goodsprings again."

Everyone agreed with Titus's plan, even if they thought it was unpleasant.

Ringo, who'd been helping clean up and move corpses, asked Titus, "Why do you wanna wrap the bodies?"

"So they don't bleed on my fucking helicopter," Titus said. Some people laughed, including Olivia and Cass. "It's just practical," he continued. "But also—as I just thought of this—if you didn't know it's only mess containment, since you wouldn't know how they got there, if you came upon the six bodies of your dead friends—as a Powder Ganger—and they're all oddly wrapped in something for no discernible reason, that'd make it kinda more fucked-up and weird, right?"

"Yeah, that would be kind of weird," Ringo said. There were a few murmurs of agreement.

"Right," Titus said, then added as a joke, "I just don't want 'em bleedin' on my nice helicopter!" Olivia and some others giggled.

With a few of them eyeing Titus oddly, everyone went their ways, most of them into the saloon. Olivia and Raúl, who wouldn't be disturbed by it, would be searching and stripping the Powder Gangers' bodies. Meanwhile Titus would be checking around town for plastic, gecko hides, duct tape and any other wrapping materials he could use, as there likely wouldn't be much plastic or many hides or non-porous materials around, though everyone had duct tape. He'd also be finding the giant geckos killed in the radscorpion scramble and skinning them with one of his many knives for their hides. Worst-case scenario: he might use some of the Powder Gangers' clothing for wrapping, though blood and other fluids would seep through cloth.

For Titus gathering materials and skinning geckos and for Olivia searching the bodies didn't take long.

Unsurprisingly the weapons the six dead men had on them were kind of shitty, and they had very little ammo. The Browning Hi-Power—also called in the original French _Grande Puissance_, or P-35 or HP-35 or GP-35 for 1935 when the design was finished; it was begun by John Moses Browning, who died in 1926 before its completion, and finished presumably between waffle breaks by Dieudonné Saive of the Belgian firm _Fabrique Nationale d'Herstal_ (National Factory of Herstal), whose parent company in the modern world before the Great War, the Herstal Group, also happened to own the American companies Winchester Repeating Arms and Browning Arms Company—was a good pistol but old, and the two the Powder Gangers had on them were in poor condition, missing parts, maybe not functional anymore. Olivia couldn't tell where or whom it'd come from but she found an old Weatherby rifle, probably a Mark V, in .270 Winchester, which had no ammo in it. There was also one varmint rifle in .223 with a thumbhole stock that had evidently been built poorly by hand sometime after the Great War. Olivia gathered a few bullet casings, 9x19mm and .223 and one 5.56mm, and four empties out of six loaded rounds still in the cylinder of Joe Cobb's revolver, a silver Colt Single Action Army, also known as a Model 1873 and ironically a Peacemaker, in .357 S&amp;W Magnum. Two of the Powder Gangers only had mêlée weapons: a dirty cleaver that wasn't sharp probably from their prison's kitchen, and a very nicked baseball bat with some old bloodstains on it that the text "Since 1879" was mostly illegible on.

The clothing and armor they had was more or less worthless but Olivia would be selling it anyway, she told Titus, to recoup the cost of her ammunition. She mostly loaded her own .50 BMG rounds anymore for consistency and reused fired casings and still had to buy new powder and primers and often bullets, especially for match rounds, but to get new brass for loading she occasionally had to buy fresh rounds from the Gun Runners or the NCR, and at the moment .50 BMG was unreasonably expensive, despite unpopularity. Sometimes she'd just use brass she collected in other calibers and melt it down to forge new big .50 BMG casings, which wasn't fun.

Titus asked Olivia to let him know if any of the dead men's underwear—if she noticed—was in good condition because he could've used another pair or two, but none of it was, not even Joe Cobb's. She and Titus had kind of assumed he was the type of gang leader to keep all the best stuff for himself—which he was and he did, but his underwear still had holes all over and of course the dickhole button had fallen off, and they had more than one shit stain and piss stain on them. Titus looked at them more closely than Olivia, who'd only wanted to check out Joe Cobb's dick. She'd been disappointed by that too.

"Can I look at your dick, Titus?" Olivia asked, around three quarters serious.

He didn't say "What?" or "Are you kidding?" or "No," which Olivia loved; Instead, he said "Not right now" with a tone of "later, yes."

"Do you wanna look at mine, boss?" Raúl asked her.

"No," Olivia said.

"Come on," Raúl said. "Look at my dick."

"I don't want to!" Olivia said.

"Just look at it!" Raúl said, chasing her.

"No!" Olivia yelled, running.

Titus was starting to consider shooting or dive-tackling Raúl when he realized it had become a joke by then, or maybe was the whole time. They only went on for a few more seconds. Almost everyone who saw it laughed.

Titus had found a lot more plastic wrap and sheeting than he expected to, enough for four of the six men's bodies. He also had a fair amount of dismembered pieces of them left over. The other two bodies and their pieces he wrapped carefully in clothing, gecko hides and a lot of duct tape.

"Do you wanna go do something with me real quick?" Titus asked Olivia out of nowhere.

Without hesitation she said "Yes," then wondered just what he had in mind, and hoped it was something very naughty.

"We forgot to take out the radscorpions' poison glands," Titus said, letting her down. "Actually it'd be _venom_ glands. If animals produce it it's venom. I think that's how that works."

"Oh. Okay," Olivia said, and Titus must've seen it on her face then.

"What's wrong?" he asked earnestly.

"Nothing," she said automatically. He just waited, looking at her. He knew her too well; He actually paid attention, something she wasn't used to but liked. "When you said 'go do something,'" Olivia said, "I just had . . . something else in mind." She tried to make it sound off-handed.

"Like what?" he said. There was this tone in his voice like he might've done anything for her just because she wanted him to.

"Just . . . " she said.

"Was it dirty?" he said, with a bit of that in his voice. He was being a little silly, but his voice was so sexy and deep and lovely she couldn't laugh. It sounded like breaking chocolate. It just made her wet.

She looked into his eyes and couldn't lie: "Yes," she said. To her, her voice sounded stupid and small, but to him it and the admission was sexy. He hesitated, and didn't act on it right then. It just seemed like now wasn't the right time, even if what happened between them was really good.

He smiled ambiguously, but clearly liked the idea of Olivia thinking dirty thoughts or at least didn't disapprove of it. She hoped he wouldn't have a problem being with a woman who touched herself and liked to masturbate, and knew what she liked and sometimes even liked to talk dirty and stuff. She hoped he could keep up with her. But she was sure he could.

Olivia got a great idea right then. It involved mistletoe. _I'm gonna do it_, she swore to herself. _Maybe tomorrow_.

Radscorpion venom glands were in big bulbs at the ends of their tails, a receptacle tipped with a stinger. Larger radscorpions tended to have more than one gland in them. Titus and Olivia used scalpels to cut the glands out of the dead flesh, both scalpels Titus's: a very high-end obsidian surgical scalpel, and a medical cutting laser—a handheld laser scalpel, another pre-war medical technological innovation. Titus had the more mundane obsidian one on his person like normal and the laser one in his trauma bag, in the dumpster by the general store only a few seconds away, so he went and got it. The laser was for her, for him the mundane one. The laser was the harder to use, at least in combat, because it had loads of settings and flexibility and the controls weren't intuitive, and it was sensitive, meant for sterile surgical environments, not open deserts, but it was much better and quicker and easier for cutting radscorpion venom glands out. With the mundane scalpel you had to crack the bulb thing open first, like with another knife, or a knife and a hammer if you didn't happen to be using a ridiculously high-quality obsidian scalpel, whereas the laser just went right through the exoskeleton, like a chainsaw through cheese.

Titus had to take a minute to instruct Olivia in some of the basics of laser scalpels, because she'd never used one before, using two of the small radscorpions as test dummies because they were the most particular, the hardest to get the venom glands out of with the least room for error and the thinnest skin. Then he watched her do one more small radscorpion to be sure she had it down, which she did. She told him she was shit with medical stuff but she did fine.

They split up and worked quickly separately. It took less than two minutes to extract the venom glands from the rest of the radscorpions because they ran between corpses.

They just threw all the venom glands in Olivia's leather backpack when they were done, and then Titus put the laser scalpel back with his gear.

Then they finished organizing all the Powder Gangers' stuff and clothing and armor they'd be selling or keeping, and Olivia and Titus talked about what to do next. She'd break down most of the Powder Gangers' ammo, but the gunpowder would all be useless because while there were some more common types of it for pistols or shotguns or rifles, it would still be impossible to identify properly, and science was just too dangerous to fuck with. For all she knew the Powder Gangers might've loaded some or all of their bullets by hand dangerously badly, like using rifle powder for a pistol, or maybe moisture had seeped into a badly sealed cartridge and got in the powder and ruined it, or who knew what else; a lot could go wrong. Powder and ballistics weren't quite as simple as they seemed. Titus wanted to go dump the bodies; Olivia wanted to sell some shit then go dump the bodies. He had the gear to dump the bodies at night if he felt like it but he wanted to get it done during the day.

"How about this," Titus said. "I'll go get Viana and move the Black Hawk and load the bodies. By the time we finish you'll probably be done selling stuff."

"Selling 'shit,' I said," Olivia corrected jokingly. They smiled at each other. She said, "Anyway, that works for me."

They did just that. On the way, Titus collected the stuff he'd set down in the dumpster by the general store.

Viana had landed the UH-60M Black Hawk in the northern part of town in a clearing, Titus could see. He found her before going to it; she was back in the saloon getting a drink and talking to Ringo; and took his HK417 back from her then asked her to help him with the Black Hawk.

"You pay me for that," Viana said. "You don't have to ask." She didn't seem to be hitting it off with Ringo.

"Yes I do," Titus said. "You can refuse."

Not appreciating the distinction, she walked with him to the Black Hawk.

Titus strapped down his gear in passenger seats for the moment and locked his SRS and HK417 in the weapon rack. He'd expected to see Olivia's Hécate 2 there, then remembered she was still carrying it around strapped to her back.

Titus and Viana went through checklists and moved the helicopter, setting down about where Titus had earlier, southeast of the saloon on the road by where a telephone pole had been standing, close to where Titus had put the plastic and hide-wrapped Powder Gangers' bodies. The landing didn't draw a crowd this time. They accidentally blew some parts of the Gangers away in the helicopter's rotor wash as they landed. After shutting down and fulfilling checklists again, Titus got out and collected the air-dispersed Powder Ganger bits. He thought he found all of them. Viana thought he took too long trying to.

He started loading the bodies into the middle of the cargo compartment of the Black Hawk. He intended to do it himself. Viana got out to help. He said no thanks. She insisted. He had her stand in the helicopter and help pull the bodies up in. The more intact ones, anyway.

Afterward he said thanks and Viana was drinking from a bottle of water when Olivia came up to them. ED-E, Rex and Raul were with her. Olivia said they wanted to come, but that Cass wanted to hang out in the saloon with Sunny and Trudy. Powder Gangers had been harassing and doing worse things to caravaneers and the NCR along the I-15 for a little while now; Titus was surprised Cass didn't want some low-level revenge on them, like watching their bodies treated disrespectfully.

Jean Airport was about 8 miles away from Goodsprings. Crossing the beautiful orange and pink cloud-dotted southwestern sky in the Black Hawk seemed to take seconds, not long enough to appreciate the sight of it. The western Powder Ganger camp was just south of Jean, Nevada, only two minutes' walk away on the I-15, which went southwest.

From a few thousand feet up in the air, the camp didn't look like much. It looked like almost nothing. Titus and Viana lowered the helicopter smoothly; wind and gusts weren't bad; and when they got lower and closer and the camp loomed larger below them it continued to not look like much. It was aside a big, tall, rusty and antique semi-trailer truck from before the war with a long semi-permanent trailer attached to it, the trailer angled down a slope and spilling into the big radiation swamp behind the camp; and walled off by the truck and its trailer was the camp area: open, a table with a folding chair by it, a few boxes and barrels, planks of wood for seats around a small campfire in the middle; and a little white camper on the left.

On the Black Hawk's intercom Titus asked Viana if she would keep them at a hover; They were maybe 50 feet off the ground. Viana said she'd be happy to. Titus went back into the cargo-or-crew compartment, touching Olivia in her chair on the arm as he passed by, then carefully sliding the wide side door open. Wind whipped around inside. The constant whine of the engines and rotors holding them up seemed louder.

Titus started dumping the bodies, interspersing them with limbs and chunks of torso and spilled organs.

The bodies fell, flopping and turning and rolling in the air as they dropped. They kicked up big plumes of dust as they landed, ones clearly separate from the waves the helicopter's rotors caused constantly. It was sort of sad to Titus, but Olivia found it funny/awesome and liked and respected him even more for thinking of and then doing it. She could dimly hear some of the bodies impact, or thought she could.

One landed in the campfire, which might've been an accident.

One hit the camper, left a dent and rolled off.

One hit on the slope and slid down into the huge radiation swamp by the camp.

Titus aimed well enough that all the bodies landed within the campsite, and he was pretty sure all the pieces landed inside it too, though it was harder to tell with them. Olivia helped; it was smooth for him with his hands in green flight gloves, but her bare fingers stuck to some of the plastic, and some of the gecko hide wrappings were a little fresh. The bodies weren't warm anymore, and fortunately weren't squirty, but they were still squishy and heavy. She could tell Titus had good aim because no powder charges went off around the camp. Powder Gangers always planted little bombs around their campsites. Then again, she and he had probably gone through there recently to disarm and take them all. His aim was good, anyway.

Olivia helped with the last bodies, just watching at first.

Titus was astounded afterward when he didn't see any blood or shit on the floor of the helicopter, but he still washed it out later.

Olivia looked down at the bodies for a moment as Titus went back into the helicopter's cockpit. She thought about everything he'd just done. She went up to the cockpit to talk to him and tapped on his shoulder. He looked back at her. She mimed "take your helmet off." He did. They couldn't hear each other well from the noise of the helicopter flying, so they had to yell a little; The Black Hawk wasn't designed for comfort, it was designed to move stuff.

"I LIKE YOU. YOU HAVE BALLS," Olivia said to him, kind of yelling; Just audible over the rotors and engines, it sounded odd, a yell somehow like a normal inside voice.

Titus smiled and then laughed along with her. Viana, who heard it too, laughed, but neither Titus nor Olivia noticed it and she didn't get the reference.

"YEAH?" Titus said.

"YEAH," Olivia said. "I LOVE YOUR BALLS."


End file.
